Grace was walking to the train when a man fell from above. Her life would never be the same.

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Although it wasn't a car crash, I was a part of a collision.

It was mid-afternoon, October 2018, at Westfield shopping centre in London. I was in my fourth year of medical school at the time. As is the standard practice at large London medical schools, we had been shipped off to various places outside the city for four months 'on peripheral'. I was living in Maidstone as part of my Women's Health placement, flitting between Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells hospitals. I had been allocated there with three of my closest friends. It was my first time seeing a birth. I was feeling more confident, now in my second year of clinical placements, even if the extent of my involvement was holding a retractor to pull the skin away during an operation, cutting excess thread from sewn surgical stitches, writing a freshly born baby's name for the first time on a tiny patient wristband.

We only had a few more weeks left before we would move back to London. I had a coaching shift in the city at the climbing centre I worked at for extra money, so my friend drove me in, dropping me off at a shopping centre so I could catch the tube up to Manor House.

Events here become a collection of moments, and sometimes I don't trust myself on their accuracy. How can you be sure if you remember something, or if you're imagining a memory because you've been told it happened so many times with so many different variations? Because you've seen it written down on official documents, drawn up by important people, and so have taken it as fact?

My friend and I hugged goodbye at the escalators, planning to meet up later. I was walking down the atrium towards the train station when the collision occurred.

I awoke to find myself lying on the floor of the shopping centre.

Watch: 5 things about grief that no one tells you. Post continues after video.

The strangest part was waking up for the second time that day, not realising I had been unconscious. Someone was holding my head still, tightly. Faces drifted in and out of my view. The adrenaline jolted me wide awake. Thoughts frantically flickered through my mind in those first minutes. I told the faces that they need to call my partner, to call my parents. I told them my phone is in my bag.

I began to sense that there was another person lying near me. Were they a part of this? They were telling this figure he fell from the third floor. I found out later that he jumped.

I realised at that point that I could not feel my legs. No, this phrasing isn't entirely accurate; it's not that I couldn't feel them, it's that my legs didn't feel anything back. As if they had ceased to exist.

Image: Supplied.

The collision had broken my spine, causing bone to press into my spinal cord, paralysing me from the chest down. Multiple breaks, in fact, but I would only find this out much later.

How surreal it is to read your own MRI report years on, finding out injuries you didn't even realise you had. Like a plug yanked from its socket, I had been disconnected from the lower half of my body in an instant.

I remember crying, maybe screaming.

And in that moment the life that I had mapped out so well, so clearly, no longer appeared in front of me. It fell away to reveal a nothingness. The tracks had changed, I was on a new course.

Everything was different now.

While the sequence of events themselves may be simple — and may be all that strangers want to hear — what has come to mean so much more to me, what I really want people to understand, is what came after. I have spent the years since being discharged trying to find a new place in the world, a new community, a new identity.

Image: Supplied.

I like to think taking a history from a patient is a guided storytelling, stories we can take and compile into clues to help treat someone. Lots of what I do at work involves listening to stories every day, and from there forming a plan to treat or support. Now I have a story that others ask me about, without the justification of any real therapeutic purpose or action.

I sometimes want to respond to the enquiries of strangers with: why do you want to know? Or more importantly, why do you think it's acceptable to ask this question so casually, so flippantly, to me or any other visibly disabled person? How would you feel if I asked you to recount the most traumatic events of your life, every time you meet someone new?

Do I scare you? I want to ask. Does my appearance frighten you?

Image: Supplied.

These questions are so often framed as harmless curiosity, but for some it seems to be the only way to interact with me, the only thing I can talk about now, the only thing people are interested in. As if I am in a permanent state of acute illness. I want people to understand what it's like to be plagued almost daily by such questions up front, before all else; to know what it feels like to have your life decided, defined by a singular day, a day you remember so little of. In taxis, in the pub, in lifts. My medical training had coached me to look for clues and signs in other people's bodies to trace the root of disease, but suddenly it's my own body that's medicalised at every turn.

In this way, I am reminded regularly that to others there must be something inherently wrong with the way that I am. It makes me feel like an alien; people need to know where I have come from. My backstory must be revealed, because the mystery is disconcerting.

My body has somehow become something to explain right away, to ease other people's discomfort. A wheelchair, it turns out, is the elephant of all elephants in the room. I cannot simply exist.

This is an extract from To Exist As I Am: A Doctor's Notes on Recovery and Radical Acceptance by Grace Spence Green. Pre-order here.

Feature image: Supplied.