For someone who isn’t very good at asking for help, breaking your neck and being completely reliant on the help of others isn’t the easiest position to find yourself in.
Liza Putwain, 44, a teacher from just outside Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, found herself relying entirely on the help of others after breaking her neck in a freak accident whilst competing in a challenge obstacle course in September 2023.
About 50 minutes into the course – one she had completed every year since it started – Liza was flipped from an inflatable seesaw and broke her neck.
The film studies teacher was taken to Ipswich Hospital where she was told she had broken her neck and had suffered damage to her spinal cord. She was later transferred to Addenbrooke’s for her surgery and recovery.
Unable to move from her neck down, Liza, a widowed mum-of-three, had to rely on medical staff to do everything for her, from sitting her up in bed to prevent bed sores to scratching her nose to helping her into the shower and going to the toilet.
“You feel very infantilised because you have to ask someone to help you go to the toilet and wait until somebody’s ready to give you a shower. Particularly when you can’t get out of bed, and you press a button, but you have to wait. I know the NHS is overstretched but it’s not until you are actually in that bed that you realise that.”
Liza spent four weeks in Addenbrooke’s for her recovery, which she says was very gradual. After waking up following her operation, in which her spine was realigned and she had some metal inserted into her neck, Liza said she still wasn’t able to move. She was unable to lift her arms to scratch her nose and there was no guarantee of what her recovery would look like.
She said the feeling in her legs returned gradually and about two weeks after her operation, a nurse helped her out of bed for the first time, so she could use a walker to take a few steps to her chair.
“I was so wobbly, I was so scared,” she said. “It was like a shuffle of a few steps to sit in a chair. But it felt amazing. I had completed marathons before and it was that kind of sense of achievement.”
Although there were no guarantees of what her recovery would look like, Liza said staff in the Neuro Critical Care Unit (NCCU), where she was cared for in the first few days of her recovery, were the ones who encouraged her to run in this year’s London Marathon after she had to defer her place following her accident. “They were the ones who told me I could do the London Marathon and that became my motivation, something to aim for.”
Returning home a month after surgery, Liza said doing anything again for the first time was really scary; from going for a walk to driving a car and going on her first run.
“I was just so glad to go home but at the same time so scared. I couldn’t do much at all really, just a slow steady walk. I couldn’t move my right arm and I am right-handed so I had to use my left arm to lift my right arm to help me clean my teeth and I could just about wash my face. The kids would go to school and it would take me all day just to put a load of washing on and hang it out. It was very frustrating.”
She relied a lot on her friends and family when she first came out and said her close friends really helped get her through those early days.
Her daughter, Ella, had gone on holiday just after she had come out of hospital so had a bit of a panic when Liza came out, so Liza’s friend Jason drove all the way to Devon to pick Ella up and bring her home.
Liza – who wants to be as open about her recovery as possible to help others – said her friends even helped shave her armpits when she first got home.
“It was the first thing I wanted to do when I got home, shave my armpits. I could lift my left arm but not my right, so my friend Jo held my armpit up while my other friend Penny shaved my armpit for me.”
Taking her neck brace off after six weeks off was also really scary for Liza – “but my physio was amazing. She just got me turning my neck to prove I could do it. I remember her reassuring me telling me, ‘Your head isn’t going to fall off.”
Liza started having physio, including Pulsed Magnetic Field Therapy. Three months after her surgery, she had her first session with a personal trainer, and started working with weights, and did her first run in March 2024 – six months after her accident.
During her recovery, however, she fell over on a run and sprained her ankle and broke her finger. “My friends and my family were just like, ‘can you please stop running?’ But I was like ‘no’. My compromise was agreeing not to do obstacle courses again but I kept running.”
In August last year, she had a cyst removed from her neck and then one month later ran her first half marathon – three days before the anniversary of her accident. “I’ve run tonnes before that but I will never forget doing that one and being able to do it.”
During the run she got chatting to another runner whose son had been treated at Addenbrooke’s as a baby after being diagnosed with cancer. Liza said: “People have told me I inspire them but other people definitely inspire me when I hear their stories. Runners are like the best kind of people.”
Although incredibly positive, Liza said the dark times came when worrying about her kids, who lost their dad, Ian (pictured below), just months before Liza’s accident.
Her daughter, Ella, had to grow up really quickly and help run the house when she was in hospital – although Liza said there were funny moments with her kids too.
Once she spotted her daughter, Ella, on Instagram wearing one of her jumpers she had never worn before and ended up giving it to her because it looked so good on her. Other times, they would send links to her in hospital for things they wanted her to buy.
But, she said, it was hard for her to let her children, Ella, Sophie and Charlie, see her so upset. “I just found my children caring for me really difficult. Sophie, my middle one, is a real empath and my carer so she learned to put my collar on and off for me. And they had to see me as I was, quite tearful and kind of just dealing with the trauma of it all. But they were dealing with the trauma of it all too, so that was hard having to rely on them.”
“They all got registered as young carers but the support they got from their college and schools was amazing. And it has been through everything we have been through.”
Liza also set up a Facebook page where people offering to help could sign up to help her with any jobs she needed doing – like walking her dogs or picking up a prescription from the chemist.
“I’m not great at asking for help but I realised my sister and close group of friends had done so much while I was in hospital. Lots of people were asking if they could do anything to help so this way I thought if I ask for help if anybody wants to offer to do it rather than having to ask specific people and them saying no, it could work. Everyone rallied round and did so much.”
Now a year-and-a-half after her operation, Liza says the lasting physical effects of her accident include not being able to feel any sensation in her fingertips on her right hand and only a couple on her left. The soles of her feet tingle constantly too and become painful when cold and her reactions have slowed too. “The amount of plates and cups and stuff I’ve broken because I can’t get there quick enough… I just get there a fraction of a second too late.”
Liza, who teaches at Abbeygate Sixth Form in Bury, has run two marathons previously – Edinburgh and Brighton; Edinburgh in 3 hours and 55 minutes – but says she wants to run this year’s London Marathon on April 27th for Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust, to raise money for the hospital and staff who helped save her life.
She has heavy praise for all the medical staff who looked after her along the way – from the paramedics to the surgeon who showed so much compassion to the medical staff and the female doctor who reassured her she wouldn’t choke if she was sick when she was first admitted.
Liza has since approached paramedics in the hospital just to tell them what a difference their colleague made to her when she was first admitted – telling them that other patients would feel the same about them but not know who they were to thank them.
A really moving moment for her was watching her surgeon, Mark Kotter, perform the same operation he had performed on her in a documentary he was part of.
“He asked me if I wanted to see the operation he had performed on me so I said yes. He had performed almost the same operation he had performed on me. It was on a lady, in her 40s, a single mum with four children. But when he talked about it on the documentary, he was quite emotional about it on camera. He said he knew he had to save her because she had her kids at home. She was a single mum like me. And I just thought, that must have been how he felt about me. So, it’s not just about somebody cutting you open and performing the surgery. He was quite emotional about it. It was very moving to watch.”
Explaining why she wants to raise money for Addenbrooke’s and the staff that helped save her life, Liza says: “I love Addenbrooke’s. It’s weird because you could go one way or another, and you could be like, I never want to see that hospital again, but I feel so safe here.”
“Being there for as long as I was you just realise how much additional support is needed. Everyone is doing the best they can but the NHS is just so overstretched and it’s like I say to everybody, you just don’t know when you will need it. You hope it won’t be you at some point, but it probably is going to be you or our loved ones or someone that you know.”
Click here to donate to Liza’s Just Giving page. Click here to read more of her story.
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