At the end of April this year, my nine-year-old and I were living our best lives – enjoying the sights and sounds of a Sunday cycle around a country park. Then, without warning, my front wheel slid on a damp strip at the edge of the path – as unspectacular as it was unexpected. Time seemed to slow down as it dawned on me I was about to hit the deck. My left arm bore the brunt, and later at the hospital an x-ray showed I’d fractured the radial head. After eight weeks off the bike, getting back on proved much more difficult than I expected – and now, as a clinical psychologist, I want to understand why.
The mood changes set in early on. For the first two weeks after the accident, I was sad, irritable, scared of everyone and everything, wanting either to comfort-eat chocolate or to cry. In the third week, I switched to work mode and started to think like a trauma therapist
