Acquire The World I Fell Out Of Rendered By Melanie Reid Shown In Edition

listened to the audiobook of this, read by the author, I pretty much forced myself to listen to it as, like the author, I define myself and my life by doing physical things and I thought it would be good to force myself to face headon the idea of that not being an option.
It's a frank, funny story that doesn't hold back on details, read with warmth and compassion that has given me better insight into life in a wheelchair, as well as absolute certainty that I should not go to hospital in Glasgow.
This is a hard book to review,

Ive read some autobiographies that are very similar to this, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” by JeanDominique Bauby and “The Little Big Things” by Henry Fraser immediately spring to mind.
In both cases the authors suffered extensive life changing injuries and their books told the story of their struggles.
Not dissimilar to Reids book, But whereas both Bauby and Fraser were charismatic and inspiring, I found Reid to be prickly and abrasive,

I think a lot of that is to do with a shell she has built up around herself possibly to protect her reputation as a journalist.
But

the result for me was a kind of detached telling of her story, with bits that were repeated in an almost disbelieving kind of way.
As if repeating things multiple times may change the outcome, This is most likely due to the book being an extension of her “day job” as a writer, whereas the other books I mentioned have probably been written more as reflective therapy and are a bit more personal.


That said, where we did see glimpses of her emotion and humanity you really did get a sense of the person underneath all the anger.
And I am not for one second taking away anything to do with the utter tragedy of her accident or how hard she has worked on her recovery.
I have had up close, personal experience of the recovery involved in a traumatic brain injury, and I can only imagine how hard Reid has had to work to overcome her even more extensive injuries.


Its a very readable book and I did enjoy it and hope that Reid continues to improve every day.
This is as much a book about the betrayal of the body, as about the power of the mind.
We are very lucky to have someone who has randomly unlucky broken her neck and spine and became paralyzed, but who possesses such a power to give words to her experience.
She describes tantalizingly the losses, physically and mentally, such as losing the ability to sleep as you like: 'The private geometry of your night, your ability to cuddle into shapes practised from childhood.
' But also the mindnumbing dependancy: 'Continually, I assessed the size of my goodwill overdraft, drawing on other people's kindness.
' She talks about the sociology of illness, and how the discourse of battle has become part of how we perceive illness and how being brave is a way to retrieve status in the 'upperworld' of the healthy and fit.
Sad as the reason of its existence is, this is a stunning work, and an example of the redeeming power of the written word.
It took me a while to read this extremely candid memoir of ayr old woman who suffered a life changing injury after coming off her horse.

I read lots in one sitting but had long pauses in between each read, Maybe it was my frame of mind and the current global situation that prevented me from getting stuck into this well written book.


I believe people can only tell their truth from their lived experience and so to get an understanding of life following a severe neck injury/ spinal cord damage and body paralysis, to whatever degree of severity they find themselves left with, is to read a book from someone who is living with it.


Its an incredible account, Melanie Reid, the author, puts her feelings and emotions and lays them bare, It is raw, sad, and explores everything from toileting, socialising, hope, and being a sexual being trapped in a body that cant cooperate.

She has a dark, dry humour that makes this a little less heavy, It is a sobering read in all honesty, I felt close to tears multiple times,

I didnt race through this book when I sat down to read I did, but days would go by and I didnt reach for it.
So it was very intermittent for me, Maybe because of the global unrest it wasnt the best book for the time, I am glad I stuck with it though,

What this book does is makes you realise the gifts we have the gift of movement, independence, choice.
To live life in the moment and to truly appreciate all you have because you never know what tomorrow will bring.


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This book will shake you to the core, Challenge your complacency. A powerful book giving a voice to the those forced to live in a parallel world of spinal injury.
Life affirming. Darkly comic. Harrowing. Humbling. Hard to ignore the short falls of the systems of the NHS denying those with chronic conditions to continue to access support Set against the astonishing stand out care given by most of the NHS staff.
This book will make you appreciate every breath or step if that accessible to you in a new light and sheds light on depths of resilience you never knew were capable.
This is the best book of, I have been enjoying reading this book for a few reasons, Most of this book is familiar to me and this has been comforting, Spinal injury is a very personal journey but there are similarities in every case, Here, Melanie is rehabilitated in the same unit I went to saught even the smallest glimmer of hope from the same specialists met every shade of the shadiest, sweetest and funniest of characters the reevaluation and upheaval of bodilyfunction, work, relationships and home.
It's all in here, written honestly, matter of fact and without selfpity, It's smart, informative, emotional but hugely positive on our powers to heal ourselves, I listened to the audiobook version of this book,

I'd never heard of Melanie Reid before but she certainly comes across as a determined woman! The fact she falls from a horse not once but twice proves it!

She chronicles her life after the accident, but it isn't all doom and gloom, there's some dark humour too.


I found that her attempts at Glaswegian accents really grated on me, I'm not sure if it was meant to be tongue in cheek or not.


It makes you think of how suddenly your life can change and not to take anything for granted.
.rounded up to. This is a wonderfully written and absorbing book about Melanie Reid's riding accident inand how she rebuilt her mind and life.
Harrowing, hilarious and poignant, this is easily one of the best memoir's I've read and highly recommended, The most interesting bit for me was the psychological adapting to new circumstances and eventual prizing of what you have and enjoying the moment for itself.
Some big moments eg when she grasps what a huge difference it will make whether she can transfer from one seat to another by herself.
Heartening to hear she gets continuing marginal improvements which must make a big difference, Found the book a bit long, though things do continue to happen right to the end, probably seems longer because a lot of it is hard to hear.

It struck me that a lot of her experience is what everyone who becomes old goes through, she got it at one fell swoop, but it has wider application.
“My name, it would seem, is still Melanie and I am a doublyincontinent tetraplegic, ” Ive been following Reids progress off and on through her London Times column ever since she was thrown from her horse on Good Fridayand broke her neck.
She spent a year in a Glasgow highdependency hospital unit, a time she recreates in a lot of vivid and funny detail almost everyone is anonymized in the book, so the nurses are nicknamed after plants and the fellow patients by character traits.
There was so much to get used to in this new life, not least her bodys limitations and a total end to privacy.


Gut and bowel problems were a persistent nuisance a colostomy ended up being the best decision she ever made, she says, because it put her back into control of her body.
But it was no perfect fix: she remembers a horrific moment when she had a colostomy bag spill at the hairdressers and, while her husband Dave was helping her clean up with a bucket at the car, a reader came up and said, “Hello, are you Melanie Reid” Hows that for timing!

Reid speaks of adult acquired disability as “a compound fracture of the soul” that requires one to completely reframe ones existence.
She remembers the diminished life that her invalid aunt led in the midth century and childrens books like Polyanna and What Katy Did that encouraged resignation and cheerfulness no matter what.
Contrast that with the martial imagery that is associated almost as strongly with neurological rehabilitation as it is with cancer and you can see why she felt damned if she did hope for continuing recovery and damned if she didnt.
While she has indeed regained some sensation and movement in her lower body, she knows shell never be free of a wheelchair.


There were specific losses Reid experienced that I wouldnt have predicted, One had to do with her height: at over six feet, shed always been one of the tallest people in a room now, in her wheelchair, shes stuck at crotch height.
She had never realized how big a role her tallness played in her identity until she lost it, As a disabled woman she also feels asexual, This came home to her for the first time in a heartbreaking moment when she was being airlifted from the site of her accident and the hot paramedic in the chopper said “keep breathing do it for me.
” A pure romance novel scenario that clinched for her that she would never be approached sexually again,

I was least interested in Reids horsey history, which occupies aboutpages, Aboutmonths after her accident, she got back in the saddle via the Riding for the Disabled Association and was thrown again, breaking her hip.
Lightning does strike twice sometimes! At that point she gave up on horses forever, though she does still let people stable ponies at her remote Scotland home and has driven horsedrawn carriages since.
Given that closure on horses, I wasnt sure why she devoted the epilogue to the irrelevant story of rider Jo Barrys remarkable recovery.


Today, Reid maintains something like independence by driving a specially adapted car, and can manage transfers to and from bed by herself.
Her column helps her feel purposeful, while all kinds of other things have faded into triviality, like female body woes and the sort of daily annoyances that once caused friction with her husband or son.
Although she cant blame other tetraplegics for giving in to the temptation of suicide, she holds onto enough hope to keep her going, and takes joy in simple things like seeing birds pass through her garden.


There is a definite message here: appreciate what you have while you have it, because your life is never as bad as you think it is.
Though it is a touch overlong, this is a great example of an accessible medical memoir that draws attention to the struggles the disabled go through.


Some favorite lines:

“My sanity, my compensation, was to pretend I was indeed that war correspondent on the front line, compelled to start recording this crazy story, to make sense of it to myself.
Besides, it was good copy, ”

“Fourfifths of my body has divorced me, but its still attached to me, ”

“Getting up was a ritual like preparing a medieval knight for battle”

“When you are in a damaged body, or have a chronic condition, you never quite cease to tease yourself with that if only and the what if.
” Five isn't enough for this book, I would have read it in one sitting if I didn't have work to go to, I read it in bed every evening for a week and ended up blearyeyed every morning because I just didn't want to put it down.

Exceptionally wellwritten, this is an honest and fascinating insight into a world that none of us want to join.
If this book doesn't make most of us stop, look around and appreciate what we have then nothing will.
I had read some of Melanie's columns in the Times but only intermittently I now want to go back and read them all so will probably subscribe to The Times for that alone.
I cannot recommend this book highly enough, I really appreciated Melanie Reid's brutal honesty in this memoir, At the age of, Melanie fell off her horse and broke her neck, She is now paralysed from the chest down, This memoir follows her almost full year in hospital after the fall and a little bit of time afterwards.


You can really tell that Melanie Reid is a journalist by trade, She peppers humour through her writing but is still very honest about how she was feeling throughout her journey.
I would put out a massive content warning for ableism though, She's very honest about a lot of things, and one of those things is about how she viewed her body at the time.
I can't even imagine how it must feel to lose all feeling below the shoulders in a second, or how I would even begin to work through these feelings.
I do appreciate how honest Reid is about this, especially when she is working through her internal biases about disabled people and, at the end, how she feels now she's been working through things for a decade.


I would recommend this even though I don't think it's perfect, I do really believe that my qualms with this are all to do with my personal preference, It was really interesting for me to learn about the different treatments are available for this type of injury and to hear about the way it affects people differently.
I also, again, appreciate the honesty Melanie Reid writes into this book, .