Hi! I'm Steve. I am a 34 year old Firefighter from London, England. I suffered a bad brachial plexus injury last May, in a motorcycle accident. I have lost the use of my left arm completely and yes I was left handed!

I've no actual memory of the accident itself and I've suffered a loss of memory which covers approx. one month (two weeks either side of the accident). From what I have been told by the police, it appears I may have been knocked off my bike by the dreaded "white van man". Yes 'apparently' because the said white van didn't stop to see if I was OK. There were three witnesses, but two of them have flatly refused to help police and won't say what happened. The third was an off duty police officer (yeah I read Marc's story too, funny how they turn up like that?), he wasn't close enough to see the accident, but said something was going on between me and the van.

Anyway I was airlifted to hospital, where I was placed in a coma and on life support. I had a pretty bad head injury as well, oh yeah and the punctured lung putting pressure on my heart, or the severed axillary artery didn't help either.

Well, after 31 hours of surgery, including nerve grafts, they brought me out of the coma, and spent three days trying to convince me I'd had a bike accident. I guess having no memory of it didn't help in that respect, and I guess the morphine provided other delusions/illusions as to why I was there.

To cap it all off, I had just spent a fortune on the bike, treating it to lots of goodies, and my wife was six months pregnant with our first baby! Well he's doing great...a fantastic little boy called Lewis.

When the accident happened, they told my wife (eventually...it took a while for the authorities to locate her) to take a friend with her to the hospital. I had been given a lot less than a 50/50 chance of survival.

Well ten months on and I'm still fighting strong. My consultants have said it is unlikely I'll regain full use of my arm, but it's going to take 2 - 3 years to find out. I've said "if you're giving me a one in a million chance, then thats fine by me, I'm going to be the millionth percent. You'll be writing about me in your medical journals" and thats my approach.

I'm back at work now, not as a firefighter obviously, but doing office work for now. I've also started taking golf lessons...the pro said I am better with one arm than I was with two! I've read the other stories and motorcycles keep cropping up. Perhaps the manufacturers of leather suits should take note and do something about this common injury area. I was wearing a nice expensive 'Dainese' suit, with full armour and crashed at only 30 mph.
So many children seen to suffer as well. It's a shame, but hopefully maybe medical advances can help sometime soon? I hope so for us all. Apparently the surgery on my nerves has only been done in the last 2 1/2 years so they're unsure how I'll turn out. I hope the surgeon had a good nights sleep before he operated on me!

Best wishes to you all, feel free to contact me at steve-pinion@ntlworld.com especially other motorcyclists.

Steve.

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