Private
Jamie Hull
On Sunday, 19th August 2007—the day I now class as my second birthday—I was piloting solo, and I had an engine fire at altitude. The fire started to build up where my feet were in the footwell, and then worked its way higher up my body. I was trying to bring the aircraft in to land as uniformly as possible, and I estimated that I wasn’t going to make the landing as the fire was building up so quickly. I knew I had to get out. I managed to pilot the aircraft right up until the last possible moment. I kept it at a level glide, managed to climb up onto the seat, having opened the canopy door on the left side, then got out onto the wing. I looked at the horizon and then I jumped off the rear of the wing. I was probably doing about thirty knots, about fifteen feet above the ground, when I jumped.
I landed in the long grass below. I rolled around to put out the flames, particularly on my shoulder and my scalp. I tried to crawl away from the scene to make some more distance between myself and the aircraft, but I was exhausted and my body felt absolutely devastated. I just lay there in a ball and I remember looking through my fingers to witness the aircraft crash land approximately eighty feet away from me. There was a short delay where it crumpled into the dirt and then a massive explosion, maybe some 150 feet of flame.
I just lay there on the ground, petrified and exhausted. This was when the reality of the incident hit me. I knew that I was very badly hurt and very badly burned. The pain was indescribable, just hideous. I waited and I crawled out and I screamed for help and eventually help came across the airfield, in the form of a couple of American voices. I remember some guy really close to me saying, “Help is on its way, buddy, you hang in there.”
And I just waited. I remember feeling myself go into shock, getting colder and colder, I remember hearing emergency sirens in the distance. The sirens grew louder and closer, so I knew that help was coming but I didn’t know if I could hold on. Then things start to get a bit hazy in my recollection. I vaguely remember medics arriving at the scene. They must have given me some kind of pain relief because suddenly things got a bit easier with respect to pain. They put me on a stretcher and I was transported a short distance to an ambulance, then transferred to a helicopter, which took me to hospital.
As part of my duties within the unit that I worked in with the Army, I was a qualified Patrol Medic, so I was very aware of the level of injury that I’d sustained. I knew that my prognosis was grim. I honestly didn’t believe that I was going to pull through and quite frankly, I didn’t want what lay ahead. I would have been quite happy to just slip away.
They assessed me in hospital and, as I found out much later, I had sixty per cent third-degree burns. I had severe internal damage from jumping off the moving aircraft. I’d ruptured my large intestine internally and lacerated my liver. I spent six months in a drug-induced coma in Florida. When I was deemed more stable, I was repatriated back to a burns unit in Chelmsford, Essex. I spent a couple of months there, where I had more plastics work done. I think they did some work on my face, specifically reconstruction of the eyelids. Then I was moved to Stoke Mandeville, another specialist burns unit.
Altogether I was an inpatient within the hospital system for about two years as a full- time patient. I then spent a further three years going through many, many outpatient appointments with physiotherapists, occupational therapists, different burns consultants and specialists. This is now my sixth year, post-injury, and I’m pretty much nearing the end of the road now, in terms of the burn surgery. I’ve had 54 surgeries under general anaesthetic, I’ve got one more surgery pending in September 2013. Then I’m looking to draw a line under the whole thing and progress with life.
There’s an old saying: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. It’s certainly something that I’ve thought about during my recovery. I wouldn’t have wished for this to happen to me. If I’m honest, the real hell of my recovery didn’t really begin until after that initial six months when they brought me out of that state of coma to try to rehabilitate me physically. I had to learn to do everything from scratch: feeding myself, sitting up in bed, eventually learning to walk all over again. I think my background has helped, the training I received with the Armed Forces helped to develop my strength of character. It was never easy for me and there were some really dark days. Sometimes I just got tired of fighting. But with the support of family and friends, eventually I managed to pull myself back up from that darkness. I knew that if I wanted to get on in life, I had to pick myself back up and get on with it. It isn’t easy but you do your best.
I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve been assisted by several organisations out there. Some smaller charities took me under their wing, and then, more recently, I’ve become a bit more involved with the things Help for Heroes do. They invited me on a number of projects, including a bob sleighing task in Utah. I was trained by Olympic bob sled experts, and after a week or so I found myself piloting a bob sleigh from the top of the run. I never thought I’d have the ability to get back out there. I also took part in the London Marathon, which I’d always wanted to do. Although I can’t run any more, I was able to walk it in 6 hours and 20 minutes, which isn’t bad going. It’s learning to improvise, learning to adapt to what I can do and what I can go on to achieve with the new body.
Another great opportunity came up last summer. I was invited on a very ambitious project to take a team of wounded servicemen and veterans to the US to race our bicycles in an event called the race across America, the RAM. We raced from the West Coast to the East Coast, a distance of about 3051 miles, across eleven states. We achieved that in a staggering 7 days, 7 hours and 38 minutes. This was a bit of a turning point for me. I participated in that event alongside other wounded servicemenand veterans, and I was encouraged and I was inspired, and frankly, I was really humbled by my fellow brothers-in-arms, who had also been graphically injured in some shape or form. To be around the energy of those individuals, as a result of the generosity and the support of Help for Heroes, was absolutely life-changing for me.