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Chapter 1: What life-changing moment does Will Pike recount from November 26, 2008?
We often talk about life-changing moments. Sometimes they're good, and sometimes they're not. Sometimes they're of our own making, many times they're not. Will Pike had just returned home from Mumbai, a city that had unwillingly played host to a violent and deadly terrorist attack lasting four days, leaving 175 people dead and more than 300 injured. Will and his partner had managed to survive.
However, Will had only just barely done so. In an attempt to escape both the fire consuming one of the country's most famous and exclusive hotels and the terrorists still occupying it, Will and his partner had fashioned a rope from bedsheets and attempted to climb down the outside of the building. He fell. Fifty feet. Roughly the equivalent of five stories.
Surgeons in Mumbai had managed to piece him back together. When he hit the ground, he'd shattered his left wrist, smashed his right elbow, fractured his pelvis and punctured a lung. Those injuries were serious, undeniably so. Life-altering? Well, on their own, perhaps. Not permanently. But it was the way that he landed that would create the injury that truly changed everything.
An injury that would mean his entire way of life from that day forward would look nothing like the one he'd left behind in that hotel in Mumbai. And up until this point, he was unaware of exactly what it was that he was facing.
I'm looking at the moon in the sky It shouldn't come as a surprise But I can't sleep
Chapter 7. Your injury is complete. There was a weird lesson in this sort of opening few days or weeks because I got repatriated. I survived the plane journey, flew over London, shed a tear for my home city, landed on the tarmac, actually felt truly safe for the first time, see my brother, get into an ambulance, taken to the hospital.
like lovely conversations with all the people around and kind of getting me back down safely. All the ambulance people, all the kind of police liaison officers, all that lot. Get to the hospital. There had been an administration mess up. They weren't even expecting me. And I'm sat in A&E for 10 hours waiting for a room.
At this point, everyone around Will is getting frustrated and ultimately just utterly exhausted. Will, however, it seems, although the one in the bed and the one who almost died, is doing his best to maintain a happy and witty exterior, trying to manage the situation.
A situation that is quickly revealing itself as one not set up to help people like him, people who are victims of catastrophic events overseas. He sends his father home, who's at this point on the brink. And to top it all off, his brother overhears two doctors discussing Will's future.
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Chapter 2: How did Will Pike attempt to escape the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel?
My brother overheard doctors saying how I'm never going to walk again. I didn't even know that at this point, but he's overhearing shit in the hallway. It was an absolute shit show. And kind of indicative of certain themes with regards to being a victim of terrorism, feeling as if you're part of something bigger, but then also feeling as if no one really cares anymore.
No one's really interested. You're like, why not? Where's the debrief? Like, is my testimony not of value? And you kind of go, no, I guess it isn't really, because what do I know? What does my testimony add to their understanding of the global terrorist attack? Nothing really. But from a victim standpoint... Being able to tell your story to officials is cathartic. Yeah, absolutely.
Chapter 3: What injuries did Will sustain from his fall during the escape?
Getting it off your chest and someone actually sitting there going, we care. Tell us what happened. We care. It's closure. It kind of grounds it in something official. Do you know what I mean? Something solid. But that never happened. I joked for days about how I was going to meet Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister. It never happened. And it became indicative of something which...
was the legal battle we then went on with regards to the fact that there was no compensation available. There was no financial aid. I joked about getting some money in hospital. Well, at least I'm part of this. At least I'll get some cash. And it's like, no, no, you won't. Because this is the UK and we don't do things like that. There's an emergency relief fund by the British Red Cross fund.
It's like 10 grand. Oh, and my workplace and advertising industry did a fundraiser and kind of raised 30 grand. That was like, wow, amazing. And you just realise how quickly money like that just goes when you're spending it on medical equipment or just anything, really. But the real loophole was around this criminal injuries compensation scheme that compensates victims of terrorism in the UK.
So if you're a foreign national and you come to the UK and you're caught up in a terror attack... And depending on the level of injury, you can receive certain compensation. But because I was in another country and India that didn't have a scheme, I was eligible for nothing. In the United Kingdom in 2008, the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme existed to support victims of violent crime.
If you were attacked on a street in London or caught up in a bombing somewhere around the country, the state recognized your suffering and provided financial support to help you rebuild your life. The system was far from perfect, but it existed. It acknowledged that those caught up in these violent incidents that were not of their doing needed help.
However, that was unless that violence had happened abroad. Until the law was changed, British citizens caught up in terrorism overseas received little or no financial support upon their return to the UK. The logic, well, if you could call it that, was simple and quite brutal. The scheme covered crimes that happened on British soil.
What happened to you in Mumbai, maybe Bali, Istanbul, that was not the government's problem. You chose to travel. You're on your own. It didn't matter that you were a British citizen. It did not matter that the attack had been carried out by an internationally designated terrorist organisation.
It did not matter that you had come home in a wheelchair with a broken body, facing a lifetime of medical costs, care needs and lost earnings. The border of the compensation scheme ended at the border of the country. Step outside it and you stepped outside the safety net.
Will Pike had survived a terrorist attack, he had fallen five stories, he'd been pieced back together by surgeons in Mumbai, repatriated home, just, and was now facing the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Will face upon returning home after the attack?
I sort of lived in a bubble of ignorance around that for two months. From the point of injury, from the terrorist attack date to when I ended up at spinal injury unit at Stanmore. I basically was in a general hospital which was looking at repairing my elbow, my wrist, my pelvis. Despite it being stabilised, they weren't worried about that.
But no one was talking to me about the implications of spinal injury. My body had been siloed in a way. You know, you've got the arm guy, the pelvis guy, the wrist guy. But there wasn't really a spine guy because that had been taken care of in India. So they're like, no one's really talking to me about this. I'm getting catheterized. I'm, you know, being turned at night to prevent pressure sores.
But I don't know why.
I know I'm in a lot of pain I know I can't move stuff I have a little bit of movement in my right leg which is sort of I think giving me hope that this will be something that I'll move on from but I just didn't know and it was only when I got to the spinal unit after my arms had been stabilised and the operations had been good enough to get those repairs underway that they transferred me and
And I eventually have a consultation with the spinal consultant there with my partner and my dad. And we're in a room and they've got the x-rays out. We're looking at the spinal cord. She's showing me how it's compressed. It's not severed, it's compressed. And at that point, I'm still kind of quite upbeat. I'm like, okay, right.
So information's getting through there and I've got a bit of movement here. And so, okay. She's like, there are two ways of classifying spinal injury. You've got incomplete and
where over time urological and motor function can return and you've got complete where essentially it's a closed circuit and that's it there's going to be no healing essentially no recovery and your injury is complete and it it was like my world collapsed it was just like optimism just drained from my body
it was like hope just evaporating like because up until that point i'd allowed myself to not really fully engage with it like i'm just gonna kind of keep it here i'm gonna you know this will be fine and then to be told that actually yeah you're not you're not gonna make a recovery from this And it was emotional ground zero.
It was two months from point of injury, but it was ground zero in terms of my emotional journey. And I kind of cut the consultation short and I just went outside and I just started crying. And I kind of measured my progress in kind of how often I've wept. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, because it's just, it is grief. Grief for who you think you're no longer going to be.
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Chapter 5: How did Will cope with the emotional impact of his injuries?
He's got cerebral palsy and he just inspires me to go to the gym every day. Oh my God, if he can do it, oh my God, what's stopping me? What's your excuse? That stuff. That's the wrong perspective. That's kind of, I don't want to be that type of perspective. But when you're in a spinal unit,
and you are surrounded by impairments for the first time, and you're looking at everyone else, you are comparing yourself to them, you're looking at their recovery or their rehab journey, and it's impossible not to see what other people are doing. But you have to understand that every spinal injury is unique because we are all unique.
Like, if you have the same level of injury, it might not affect you the same way. You might have a complete injury, an incomplete injury, whatever. But there is perspective to be taken when you were in there. And it can be humbling and it can be inspiring as well. And it can be motivating. And we all helped each other.
Because Dave told me recently, actually, which was really interesting, he flipped the table. He was like, I knew the risks. You were on holiday. You were involved in something that had nothing to do with you. And your life was shattered and your spine was smashed.
And so I take a lot from your story and the way you've managed it and the, and the humility and the whatever it is that you do, how you approach your injury. Like I've, I've fed off you. Um, ah, so we fed off each other. That's good. That's good. Will is now trying to learn essentially a new life, his new life, surrounded by those all doing the same. As he puts it, his new club.
This was early Dawes camaraderie, this was early Dawes solidarity, fraternity, that type of sense of belonging to something bigger than myself that, again, going back to these intersectionalities, as a white male middle class man, you don't You don't have, you don't have a subset. You don't have no minority culture because we are the culture. We are the defacto.
But now as a disabled man, I belong to a different club. And I'm like, oh, this is interesting. And without realizing we're there propping each other up. And that's just early doors. That's even before the term disability has been banded about. At this point, we're just medicalized. We're spinally injured.
And you're coming to terms with those things and the mechanics involved that enable you to preserve your life. And so much of it is, this is how you don't kill yourself. This is how you don't get a pressure sore. This is how you don't get UTI. This is how you stop your bowels from impacting. This is blah, blah, blah. And you're like, right, okay, I need to learn how to live again.
And it breaks you down. It's infantilizing. It's humiliating. You shit the bed. You piss yourself. You can't get an erection. You can't feel anything. You can't get an erection. You're like, wait, what? I'm 28 years old. I'm priming my life. I'm a child. I'm a baby. I'm worse than a baby. A baby's got a future.
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Chapter 6: What obstacles did Will encounter when seeking financial support after his injury?
supporting me in the best way but fundamentally i did i lost my job because it wasn't accessible we moved flat we were we were lucky my partner had enough um in the bank to be able to get a private rental that was manageable it wasn't perfect the bath wasn't accessible but we made it work and you know that first year was just oh good good to re-socialize good to get back with friends drinking playing video games chilling out
Did you ever feel like people were treating you differently? Like, you know, did you come across people worrying about saying the wrong thing? It's funny because at that point, like everyone's just, there was a lot of positive vibe. And I realized I had a responsibility within all this to myself and
which was that in order to make this as easy as possible for me, I didn't want people pandering over me. I didn't want worry. I didn't want pity. I didn't want overbearing attention. The only way that wasn't going to happen was if I put on the type of brave face that I'm managing this, I'm coping. But the only way to do that authentically was to actually cope and actually manage.
Not pretend to be. You can't. Chapter 9. These are my brothers. The change in life that Will has experienced happens to literally hundreds of thousands of people around the world every year. People who wake up one day and their life is altered completely. Imagine yourself in that situation. It's hard to think how you would respond, how you'd cope. Will has chosen to see it as an opportunity.
An opportunity to help create change. I think the spinal injury, though desperately tragic, was an opportunity to represent myself in a way that enables me to feel proud and also represent a group of people who are still marginalized, still second-class citizens.
Like, I live in North London, I live in an affluent area, and every week, every month, a new shop opens up with the same stepped entry, and I'm still barred from entering into that premises because of shoddy, outdated design. You know what I mean? So to be a part of that is incredible. because disability affects like 24% of the population.
I think the stats globally are like 1.6 billion, UK it's like 16 million. Of course, that is not all spinal injury, like that's visual impairment, being deaf, being born with cerebral palsy, having Down syndrome. These are all conditions that meet disability framework
My lived experience is not the same as theirs, but I remember going to the Arsenal after I'd been injured and I remember getting into the disability section. I was sat there and looking around and being like, oh, oh, okay. This is who I'm with now. Because my framework for disability had been spinal injury. You sit in a disability section and it's like, it's everyone. Yeah.
like complex disabilities, real complex disabilities, cognitive impairments. But it was a real eye-opener for me to be there and go, wow, I'm part of this now. When the people in the non-disability section look back with their curious eyes at the crip section, it took me time to kind of feel like I belong there. And it took me time to kind of not feel a bit like...
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