The phone call EVERY parent dreads: A young Oxford graduate on a daredevil holiday. His adoring mother fretting at home. And her heart-wrenching account of how both their lives changed in an instant

March 19, 2006. Pale shafts of sunshine are falling through the gap where the bedroom curtains don’t quite meet. I lie in bed, feeling the languorous contentment of a cat.

Unusually, my four children — all in their 20s — will be at home tonight, so I’m planning a celebration supper.

Miles, my eldest, will be back from his holiday in Austria this afternoon. At least he won’t be snowboarding today; he won’t have time because he’ll be travelling to the airport. I can feel the background fear of the past week dissolving, the fear that always lurks when he’s doing those jumps.

Time to get up: there are people coming for lunch. I’m making peppered beef; I crush peppercorns in a heavy ceramic bowl, while my husband, Ron, lays the table and sorts out the drinks.

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Lu Spinney pictured with her son Miles, before a snowboarding accident left him with severe brain damage

A couple of hours later, the main course is coming to an end, the caramelised oranges are ready and waiting and there is nothing left to do except enjoy myself with our guests.

When the phone rings, I answer it in the kitchen and the background noise of people and laughter makes it difficult to hear the young man asking me if I am Miles’s mother.

‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘Why, what’s happened?’

I know already; I know from the tone of the man’s voice even before I hear that Miles is gravely injured.

‘I’m Ben, a friend of Miles’s,’ he says. ‘He’s had a serious accident on his snowboard.’

‘What injury?’ I ask, but again somehow I know. A head injury.

Lu has written a book detailing her grief after her son's untimely death

After he hangs up, I remain standing, frozen, still holding the phone to my ear, not daring to sever the thread that connects me across sea and forests and mountains to Miles, to the person who was with him at that fateful moment when I was not.

From one instant to another the world has changed. We are no longer safe; with frightening clarity, I see each one of the people I love as though standing on the edge of a precipice — their outlines sharply etched above the abyss that now threatens us all.

My body absorbs the shock in a visceral plunge of nausea. I’m floating as in a dream, an out-of-body experience, watching myself as I put my hand up to stop the lunch-party conversation. ‘I’m so sorry, you’ll have to leave. Miles has had an accident snowboarding. A head injury.’

I can hear my voice, flat, expressionless, see Ron’s face registering confusion and shock as he stands up. Within hours, I will be flying over mountains, enduring the banter of the easyJet air hostess and of jovial passengers setting off on carefree holidays.

Miles has just turned 29, and after a week’s hard snowboarding he is fitter than ever. It’s early morning on the last day of his holiday and the sun is just beginning to glint and sparkle on the night-hardened snow.

The jump today is very high and Miles is going to take it as fast as he can, so he goes to the ski shop to buy a helmet. Out in the sunshine again, he puts on his sunglasses and looks around.

There’s a photograph of him taken at this moment: he doesn’t know it, but he is as handsome as he might ever wish to be, and the girl also caught on camera, coming out of the shop in her new turquoise ski suit, is giving him an inviting smile.

And now Miles is standing at the top of a slope that leads in one steep drop to the dip and rise of the jump. This is when he is at his happiest — under pressure, pushing himself to succeed.

Taking a deep breath, he pushes off. At first swooping from side to side, his path gradually straightens into an arrow of gathering speed.

Miles on a snowboarding trip in 2005. An accident in the Alps would leave Miles with life-changing injuries

Too fast now. He knows he’s not in control as he is taken by force up the ramp, skewing sideways when his board clips the edge. And then he is hurtling, spinning up, up into the free blue sky.

The thwack of board and helmet on hard ice, the cries of onlookers, the blue of sky and white of snow. Silence.

Then, very slowly, he sits up, raises himself, stands shakily. Friends gather round, supporting him, their faces grave.

He speaks: ‘Jesus, that was something.’ Someone asks: ‘Do you know where you are? Do you know what day it is?’

‘St Anton, Sunday,’ he says, thickly. He takes off his helmet and sits down. Suddenly, his eyes roll upwards and his body convulses, back arched, limbs juddering.

Soon paramedics are removing his jacket and T-shirt, cutting through his vest in the race to keep him alive. The air is reverberating with the thump, thump of a helicopter’s blades.

I arrive at Innsbruck University Hospital with my daughters, Claudia and Marina, my second son, Will, and the children’s father, my ex-husband David. My second husband, Ron, will fly in some days later.

Miles pictured with his sister Claudia, one of three siblings he had, in South Africa in 2005

As we walk into the vast glass and concrete foyer, I feel the air being sucked away from me.

The floor rises in waves, the walls bulge in, I can’t breathe.

We arrive at the ward. It feels as though we have entered an under-water world: tinted green glass divides cubicles and nurses’ stations, and everywhere is silent save for the rhythmic tidal swish of respirators and the soft keening of machines, like whale calls in the deep.

Nurses and doctors glide through the rooms, serious, intent on the silent bodies beached on their high beds.

Miles lies on his back, perfectly still. His strong face — the one we’re so familiar with, that we know to be so expressive, humorous, animated — is closed from us in a way it would not be if he were asleep.

A multitude of wires and tubes connects his brain and body to the bank of machines and electronic charts behind him, recording every tremor of his existence. ‘You will be all right, you’re going to be all right, you are going to come back to us. I love you so very, very much, my extraordinary, precious, beloved son.’

The first time I cry is in the bend of the corridor on the way back to the waiting room. Crying with great racked gasps, a knife-edged pain wrenching my chest.

From left, Miles, Marina, Claudia and Will enjoy a skiing trip in Les Gets, France in 1991

Day two. I’ve been handed a letter from the chief executive of BBC Worldwide — Miles has been doing a project for them as a management consultant. The letter is full of praise and wishes him the speediest of recoveries.

Again, I can’t control my tears. The letter gives Miles substance, a background. In hospital, he is simply another TBI — another Traumatic Brain Injury.

The medical staff cannot know that he has a first-class degree from Oxford, that he is thoughtful, funny, brave, kind, impatient and irascible.

The only story they have in the notes that accompany him is that he once snowboarded — not that he likes boxing and playing poker, writing poetry and playing the fool.

Pulling up a chair next to Miles’s bed, I read the letter aloud to him. He’s in a coma, breathing through a ventilator, but a little part of me is certain he is listening.

Day eight. When we arrive this evening, the doctor is smiling. ‘Your son is breathing on his own!’

We can picture his recovery; we’re euphoric. We call the family and our close friends to tell them the news. Later, many mojitos later, we dance down the street to the hotel, chanting as we go: ‘He’s breathing on his own!’

But nothing else changes, and so our euphoria is short-lived.

The days sink back into their routine; each morning I wake in the hotel room with a stab of fear, taut with foreboding at what the day might hold.

Breakfast has become an ordeal. I used to love hotel breakfasts like a childish treat, but now I am repulsed at what seems a lavishly obscene spread of food.

I am trapped in a nightmare, a ludicrous object of grief crouched in the corner, pinched and thin and angry, hollow-eyed and foul.

It is a new thing, this anger, and it is taking unattractive and unexpected forms. I could machine-gun the moon and stars, but I also want to pepper with bullets anybody or anything that comes in the way of my private grief, or anyone who may be a threat to Miles — like the nurse who seemed careless yesterday when taking his observation notes.

Miles during a skiing trip in Austria in 2005. He would suffer a head injury after taking on a high jump

Miles’s predicament has opened a door onto the relentless, unstoppable suffering of other people, every day, everywhere; this terrible thing that has happened to him is only one drop in a vast cauldron of human suffering.

I have been talking to the athletic young neurosurgeon on the ward, who is a keen snowboarder. He tells me the helmet may take the impact, but the sudden acceleration and deceleration can cause the brain to rotate within the skull. I don’t want to hear this.

The medical term for this, he continues, is diffuse axonal injury — DAI for short. If that happens, we do not yet know any way of reversing it.

Very few of the 10 per cent who regain consciousness will return to near-normal — and any improvement will have to take place within the first 12 months.

Miles, do you remember my last words to you as you were leaving the house? ‘Please don’t do any dangerous jumps, my darling!’

It was my foolish, ritual request, a kind of game we played. I loved your daring and you enjoyed my mock protectiveness (although it wasn’t really mock — I meant it, but I had to say it lightly).

I remember you hugged me with that crushing bear hug I love so much and you said: ‘Don’t worry, Ma, I’m older now. I promise I’ll be responsible.’

Miles bought his crash helmet that morning just before the jump. He would have died instantly without it.

But perhaps without it he wouldn’t have gone as fast. Perhaps he would have been more cautious, perhaps it disoriented him. Is it my fault he bought the helmet?

Will is photographed with his sisters Claudia, left, and Marina, right, at Will's wedding in 2010

Week four. I ask Professor Benir, the senior consultant, to tell me the truth: ‘What form is this brain damage going to take?’

Professor Benir looks back up from Miles to me. The damage is not to his intellect, he says.

That is not the area of the brain that is damaged. But he has suffered a very serious trauma to his brain. What is crucial now is that he begins intensive rehabilitation.

‘We have done our work here, the surgery is complete; the important thing now is for you to arrange the next stage for him.’ It takes a week of intense negotiation. Finally, Miles is offered a bed in the intensive care unit at University College Hospital in London.

There, he’ll be reviewed and assessed before being moved to an acute brain injury unit in Queen Square. Back in London, we are marked out as a family that has been visited by disaster.

I have become different, outside and inside: outside, because I am now an object of pity and horror, no longer safe; inside, because my terrible new sensitivity has destroyed tolerance — there is no room left for it.

Friendship is put to the most severe of tests. I cannot bear to think how often I may have failed my friends in the way some fail me now, so often unwittingly.

A procession of doctors give me a range of reasons why Miles cannot go to the acute brain injury unit: there are no beds available, he lives in the wrong postal district; there are limited resources.

Miles, Marina and Claudia enjoy some cake on Marina's second birthday in 1988

I discern the unmentionable truth: he is too damaged to warrant time and money being spent on him.

My confusion begins to turn to disillusionment.

Miles is still in a coma; to give up now would be unimaginable. If we allow despair to tip the balance, we are all lost.

In the past few days, he seems to have come closer to the surface of consciousness.

When we greet him, there is now a slight flicker of movement across his face; for the first time, we are seeing a glimpse of some dimly felt expression.

Then, one morning, my son Will, who is visiting Miles, is told that a Dr Mosley would like to see him. Will calls me afterwards.

His anger rings down the line like an unearthed electric current.

Dr Mosley is the eighth doctor to see Miles. ‘His prospects are extremely bleak,’ he begins.

Intensive rehab ‘would only mean the difference between his future being grim or not quite so grim — treatment would not serve any useful purpose’.

Any useful purpose!

And there’s more: ‘Many families decide, on reflection, that their loved ones would want not to be kept alive like this,’ he says.

Who is this man? How can he talk like this?

Miles is breathing on his own. There is no machine to turn off.

Miles, right, plays with his brother Will on their bicycles in London

The issue is not whether he lives or dies; it is about whether he is left to languish on a general ward.

A tall Australian male nurse is on duty when I visit Miles late that afternoon.

There is a prickle of menace about him; his manner supercilious and his handling of Miles curt and dismissive.

He looks up as I come in and then with a sweep of his arm towards Miles, he makes a mock bow. ‘There he sits,’ he says, ‘King and Lord of all he surveys.’

Miles has been placed into a large high-backed armchair, his body slumped forward awkwardly against the canvas straps that are holding him upright.

His body is slack and quiet; an image of horror. King and Lord of all he surveys!

I want to throttle the nurse, gouge out his eyes, beat him until he whimpers for mercy. I want to see him cowering and jibbering with fear while I beat him until I can beat him no more.

That evening I hear that a bed has become available at Queen Square. It’s as if Miles has won a place, against the stiffest competition, at the most prestigious institution in the world.

Two days after his transfer to the brain injury unit at Queen Square, Miles is still in a coma.

His friend, Jasper, is visiting him and I have gone to sit in the vestibule outside the ward.

Friends feel awkward in the face of his intimidating blankness and embarrassed in front of me. It is difficult to know how to speak to him; we all find it impossible to sustain a flow of one-sided conversation that sounds in any way normal.

Suddenly a nurse comes running out from the ward.

‘Miles’s mum, come quick, come quick!’ she says.

‘Miles has just opened his eyes!’

I fly through the ward and yes, there he is, sitting in his wheelchair with his deep green eyes open for the first time in eight weeks.

He has emerged from his coma!

Every moment of the past eight weeks has been geared to this one longed-for moment, the fragile dream come true.

I’m overwhelmed. ‘Miles, Miles, oh my God, Miles, you’re back, you’re awake, I must call the family, you’re back, my darling Miles...'

• Adapted from BEYOND THE HIGH BLUE AIR: A MEMOIR by Lu Spinney, published by Atlantic Books at £14.99.

© Lu Spinney 2016

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