Running in the family

WHEN 21-year-old offshore worker James Ramsay opened his eyes, at first he couldn’t work out where he was.

Realising he was lying down in a clinical-looking room he assumed he must be at the dentist. But why were his parents sitting beside the dentist chair, crying?

As James was soon to discover, he was in the Western General Hospital and it was a miracle he was even alive, following an accident at work that had left him with a significant brain injury.

James, now 35, who will be taking part in not one, but two of Sunday’s BUPA Great Edinburgh Runs, explains: I was in a coma for nearly three weeks after the accident. I can’t actually remember it but I’ve been told what happened. I was working offshore and was unloading a barrel when a crane knocked me down about 30ft on to the deck below.

“My hard hat came off and I 
landed on my head.”

James died on the deck, and had to be resuscitated before he was airlifted to hospital. After he awoke from his coma he was transferred to the Astley Ainslie in Grange Loan, where he spent three months in rehabilitation.

“They were just amazing. I had to learn to read, write, walk, talk, dress, wash, brush my teeth, comb my hair, socialise... pretty much everything, all over again. After the three months I was treated as an outpatient and I think it took nearly eight years before I felt totally healed.”

Though still blind in one eye and deaf in one ear, James, who now lives in The Jewel and works as a scaffolder, feels he has put the accident far behind him.