Before the accident, Harold Price, 82, loved being on two wheels. A retired engineer from Griffithstown in Wales, he cycled about 95 miles a week on his road bike. “Not bad for 78,” he says. On other days he’d be out on one of his restored motorbikes, as he was in June 2021, with a friend. They were riding at 10 miles an hour on a narrow road when his friend pulled out in front of him. “I had nowhere to go,” Price says. He remembers his head snapping back into his helmet before he blacked out.
Price spent months in hospital. He had broken the fifth vertebra in his neck, resulting in compression of his spinal cord. He was told he wouldn’t walk again. “That was a bit of a downer, obviously,” he says. He was determined to prove the doctors wrong. “My mind told me I could get up and walk out. But when I tried, I collapsed.”
Back home, a friend designed a wheeled lifting frame “on the back of a fag packet” to help him stand and walk, but Price fell often. “I don’t half go down. I must have a strong ticker because it seems to withstand it.”
Price with physiotherapist Sam Miggins at Morrello Clinic, Newport. Photograph: Francesca Jones/The Guardian
In 2022, while he and his wife were having work done to help make their house more accessible for Price, an engineer mentioned the Morrello Clinic, a physiotherapy centre. That’s how Price met physiotherapist Sam Miggins. After assessing the strength and movement in his legs, she turned to him and said, “I’ll get you to walk.”
“You can imagine how I felt,” Price says. “After months of being told I couldn’t!”
He began attending twice a week. He trains on an active-passive bike, with a motor that helps move his legs but still requires effort. There’s resistance training, stretching to aid movement in his hips and trunk, and walking using varying levels of support.
Progress is slow. He finds it hard to keep up his determination. “I go to bed at night and sometimes I think I don’t want to wake up. Then in the morning I think, oh well, I’ll walk again. I’ve got to get better than this.’”
It took six months to build up the strength to use an upright walker. The first time was “marvellous”, Price says – even though it hurt. Now, he and Miggins walk 400m up and down the road outside the clinic with a Zimmer. “If there are other patients there, we say, ‘Oh, you walking to the pub?’” he jokes. Afterwards, he’s exhausted. “But mentally I’m a lot better.”
Now Price can walk short distances at home with his wife, using an upright walking frame. They no longer need care workers to help him dress or get into bed. At the clinic, he’s progressed to walking with a quad stick for stability and just one person supporting him. Before, he suffered severe spasms: “My legs would shoot up at right angles.” Now those have stopped.
He goes back to hospital once a year for a review of his medication. He remembers the first time he returned after he’d learned to walk again. “The doctor said, ‘Well, Mr Price, you proved us wrong.’ I said, ‘It’s because of Sam’ and the doctor said, ‘It’s not down to Sam, it’s down to you.’”
Harold Price goes to the Morrello Clinic.
