The sound of a wailing siren growing louder was some kind of relief last Monday, as I shivered on the steps beside our hotel. An hour earlier I’d been posing for photos in the cable car and toasting a great day on the slopes with a beer and apple strudel at the top of the mountain. Now all I could think about was the pain in my back and how much it hurt to breathe.

After almost 30 years of injury-free ski holidays, it seems my luck had run out. I had managed a spectacular slip on the way to the ski lockers which, while skis and poles went flying, had somehow thrown me against a concrete wall beside the steps and it felt like my back was splitting open. When the men in red arrived from the ambulance, there was an amusing moment (if I’d been able to laugh) as they asked if I was wearing something to hold up my chest. All done with sign language. “Ah, you mean a bra? Yes I am! But I can’t take it off!” Luckily, my shocked ski-buddy was able to help them out, although undoing my bra didn’t stop the pain.

I remember a very tricky transfer onto a stretcher and being manoeuvred into an ambulance. Up above I saw two fellow hotel guests we’d shared a meal with the night before waving sadly at me from their balcony – I tried to smile back, knowing it was the end of my skiing for that week. In the ambulance I tried to answer questions about levels of pain between 1-10 and my address and date of birth, when all I could think about was how much each twist and turn and bump down the mountain roads was hurting. I knew I was breathing too fast and eventually the oxygen mask they’d fixed to my face began to help.

I’m not a fan of hospitals. I have a tendency to burst into tears when I walk into one – pathetic I know! This time it was full of people speaking Austrian, with occasional spurts of English. There were a lot of men in white coats and clip boards and worst of all my special person was sent away to the waiting room while I was wheeled off for a scan. Sometime later I was told I’d broken four ribs, plus a little damage to some bones on my spine, but that was nothing to worry about, apparently. I wasn’t going home yet.

On the ward the nurses were friendly and kind and spoke great English. Throughout the first night I was looked after by a nurse who reminded me of Villanelle from the TV series “Killing Eve”. She even had the same accent. Thankfully, she was there to help me recover and get to the bathroom, not kill me! But when she smiled and leaned over me I was a little unnerved.

The next morning the men in white coats returned bright and early and the ‘big dog’ doctor told me I could go home as soon as I could manage my own pain. I was thinking, ‘just give me loads of painkillers and I will manage it fine!’ It wasn’t quite that simple, as it seems I had to manage on limited painkillers in order to be released. I was looking forward to going back to the resort and our cosy hotel, all I needed was all the hospital paperwork and a ‘fit to fly’ certificate. That afternoon I was feeling better (mainly due to the morphine) and told them I’d like to go home please – ASAP.

A very tall bearded doctor found me in the day room, to tell me that unfortunately I couldn’t leave until the next morning and even worse, he couldn’t give me a ‘fit to fly’ certificate either. Err.. how would I get home then?Train or bus perhaps he suggested. Apparently, the injury had a slight chance of leading to a collapsed lung if I was exposed to the higher pressure in a plane – they wouldn’t want me to take that risk.

So began several days of complicated planning, discussions and phone calls to our wonderful medical insurance company. I became an inmate of room 305 – which felt a bit like room 101. I made lists of things I’d get rid of including concrete steps, boxes of tablets with very long names, low soft beds that were almost impossible to get out of and shag pile carpets that ate up earrings for supper. I watched lines of skiers snowploughing down the nursery slopes until the sun sank behind the trees and the lights of a piste basher flickered on the hillside. I looked forward to the evening meals and the banter with our new-found friends, Steve and Ann, who poured wine and ordered beers while discussing routes home and making us all laugh with their tales of past holiday misadventures.

On Saturday night we heard that British Airways had agreed to fly me home, despite Austrian medical advice. It was a relief, but also a little scary. What if the Austrian medics were right? What would happen if my lung collapsed on the flight? I reasoned that I had two, so maybe the other would be enough… it was a bit of a guess.

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Staring out at the aircraft landing and taking off between the mountains, I didn’t mention my fears. I thought about sending three WhatsApp messages to each of our children – just in case. But I decided to send a photo of their father eating a frankfurter instead and tell them I’d see them all soon. As the plane taxied down the runway, a hand slid into mine. My chest felt quite tight and I could feel the pain in my back as I breathed in. Here’s hoping, I thought. Thank goodness for ‘in flight’ meals – once they were over, I began to relax. We were half an hour in and the lung seemed to be holding out.

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When we landed at Gatwick I braced myself for the bumps, but was delighted and surprised by the softest landing ever. As passengers filed off the plane, the captain, in his blue peaked cap, was shaking everyone’s hand and blushing beneath his beard as they complimented him on the landing. “Did you know you had someone on board with broken ribs?” he was asked. He smiled slowly, “Of course we did and we did our best,” he said.

It was only on the taxi drive home that I realised I wasn’t the only one who was worried at the start of the flight. “I’d googled it,” he said. He’d also found out from a medical friend the night before what he should do if the lung had collapsed… something to do with thrusting a massive needle or a biro into my chest if the worst happened. “Where were you going to get that from?” I asked. We’d both seen something like that being done on ‘Doc Martin’, but I’m not sure about trying it for real. Thankfully, we didn’t have to. 

Now safely back home I am learning how to pick things up with my feet and walking and sitting like a puppet, without bending, keeping my back straight. The only thing that frightens me now is unexpected sneezes or getting a fit of the giggles, which hurts sooo much I end up crying, which also hurts. I know I’m fortunate not to have done more damage and that I will be able to ski another year, if I dare.