My fall from height: Calum’s story |
Saving lives by stopping falls
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How a split-second decision one cold, wet night resulted in a fused wrist, ongoing pain and a change of profession. To mark No Falls Week 2026, Calum, an ex-electrician, tells his story of falling from height and the effects he still lives with 30 years later.
Warning – this story contains graphic images of injuries.
Around 30 years ago, my life changed completely on a wet and cold winter weekend in January.
Whilst working as an electrician in a new polymer plant within a larger chemical plant, I was rushing in the dark to dig a MEWP (mobile elevating work platform) out of some mud to use it for one last task before I went home. It was actually a Saturday, so I was doing a bit of overtime to help pay for Christmas. Soaked, cold and tired – I wish I’d gone straight home.
The MEWP I was told to use was too large for the area in which I was working. As a result, once I had dug it out of the mud and moved it into a large warehouse-type building, I had to try and manoeuvre the basket over where the pipe fitters had been working the previous day to reach my work location at around 3 metres. No matter how I moved the basket, I could not get it to exactly where I wanted to work.
That’s when I made an almost fatal decision to stand on the mid rail of the basket.
The terrible sensation of my foot slipping…
The basket and I were covered in mud from digging it out earlier, and when I stood on the rail and leaned slightly, I had the terrible sensation of my foot slipping to the side.
I remember trying to grab a piece of steel as I fell past it but missed it with my fingers. The next thing I knew I was in massive pain and winded on the concrete floor, unable to breath.
I lay there for what seemed like hours, but was actually only around 20 seconds, to get my breath back and realised that I had severe pain in my back and pins and needles in my left arm.
I tried to move my left arm, but couldn’t, so despite the pain in my back I reached over to my left arm with my right arm and picked it up. There was a lot of crunching and cracking from my arm and that was when I knew this was very bad, but I was still alive.
Somehow, I had manged not to hit my head on anything despite the pipefitters having been working in the area the previous day so there was materials and pipe etc around, not to mention the hard concrete floor I landed on.
All hell broke loose
Eventually a nearby colleague heard me calling and went to get help. That’s when all hell broke loose, with lots of people running to the scene from management, other colleagues and then the paramedics and police arrived to take over.
The paramedics decided that due to my back pain, I needed to be removed on a spinal board from the area to the ambulance. I was then trussed up and strapped to the board with head blocks and belts and placed carefully into a waiting ambulance. I was taken by police escort under blue lights to the nearest hospital, which was about 20 miles away. As I laid there in the ambulance, the paramedic kept holding the board and trolley as we went round the corners to stop me rolling sideways. After around what felt like approximately 30 minutes, we reached the hospital where I was immediately checked over and sent for x-rays.
On my return from the x-rays, I was placed in a resuscitation room in the A&E and eventually a consultant came to see me. He asked how I felt and if I in much pain, to which I said that my arm was having pins and needles, and my back was by far the most painful. He told me that I had broken my back and chipped a section of bone off, but this was a stable fracture and would not require anything else but rest for it to heal on its own.
Hit it with a sledgehammer
I said that was great news… but what about my arm? I asked if he was going to put my arm in plaster – it was fairly obvious to me even at that point that my wrist was badly fractured. He said the plan was that they were going to admit me that night and do the first surgery in the morning. This was a shock, as I thought they would just put me in plaster and then I noted his words “first surgery”.
The consultant noticed my surprise and said that on a scale of 1-10 my arm fracture was around a 15 and I could not have damaged it better if I’d hit it with a sledgehammer. He explained it would take many surgeries to get any function back, if at all. To say this was a shock would be an understatement.
I had a very painful night and went to the operating theatre the following morning. I woke up again that afternoon with my arm in a vertical sling supporting my elbow. I appeared to have what I can only describe as a TV arial coming out of my arm with pins and cross bracing in metalwork. It was a very big shock, but I had no pain at this point.
Recovering from surgery
I was discharged home after a few days and had to go to the GP surgery to get these pins protruding from my arm cleaned every day. Most days, a GP would ask a colleague to come in and have a look at this metal structure and my injury by way of learning. I now know what a caged animal feels like at the zoo.
After 3 months of this, I was asked to come back into hospital for another surgery where the external fixator (which I now knew the name of) would be removed and various plates and screws added to further hold my smashed wrist together. This time they had not only opened up a 150mm cut in the back of my wrist but also in my palm which was extremely painful.
After another few days in hospital, I was discharged home with medication and oral morphine and told to return to the fracture clinic in a weeks’ time, which I did. I was x-rayed again and the consultant told me there was nothing more he or his team could do for me, and he would refer me back to my local hospital for follow up.
Nothing more he could do
I actually knew the local top orthopaedic surgeon personally after having worked on his house months before and asked if I could be referred to him, which the consultant duly did.
A few weeks later I finally went to his clinic and he was shocked at my injuries. He said there was nothing he could do either but he would refer me to the top hand and wrist surgeon in the country, who resided in Bath which was some 2 hours’ drive away from me.
I eventually got to see this specialist and he reiterated the severity of my injury, but said that he would surgically try to create some function in my wrist which had been smashed into lots of tiny pieces. Unfortunately he could not promise a positive outcome. He did six further surgeries on my arm, using pins, screws and plates. However, it failed to give me any real function or hand strength.
Arthrodesis of the wrist joint
By this point I’d had nine months of work after the accident and then at least three months off to recover after every operation. I couldn’t continue.
It was at this point that I requested arthrodesis (fusion) of the wrist joint. This was a final and definitive solution which meant taking bone from my pelvis and fusing all the remaining small bones in my wrist to encourage them to heal into one large mass of bone, eliminating what was left of my wrist joint forever.
So, as a result of this injury I now have a completely fused, solid left wrist joint that does not move. Because of the original injury I lost most of the strength in my hand, meaning I had to think about changing profession as I was struggling to be an industrial electrician during the period of all these surgeries and time off.
I sometimes also get back ache to this day, but I was told to expect this for the rest of my life too.
Using my experience for good
It was during the early days of my recovery that I decided to use my experience for the good of others. During my recovery periods, I retrained to move into a safety career which is what I’ve been doing for the last 25 years, trying to prevent someone else from making the same rash and stupid decision I did.
I have many fatalities and serious injury investigations under my belt now, both in the UK and overseas in this role and despite this, I still try to motivate others not to take the chance I did. It simply was not worth it and nearly cost me my life. I still have occasional flashbacks now even 30yrs later and that terrible sensation of falling.
I had rolled the dice at 3 metres height and lost the bet, plus a significant part of my life to hospitals, surgery and pain. But I was still alive!
Thank you to Calum for sharing his story, which he hopes will remind others to work at height safely.
For advice and guidance on the safe use of MEWPs visit IPAF.
