At one point they sent me a psychiatrist to see if I was okay and this woman sat on the edge of my bed and said, "So it was a car accident was it? Please leave, because if you can't be bothered to read the notes before you come in here, I am not opening up to you. He mostly listened, I was in floods of tears as I kind of let everything out, and I think it's so important to do that; you mustn't bottle it in.
My advice to anybody who has had a traumatic incident, a traumatic life changing catastrophic injury or event or illness, write it down in your laptop and password protect it. You may never use it, but get it all out there. And that's what I did. As soon as my shoulder had healed enough for me able to write, I wrote down everything I remember about the attack, which was everything, later it became the first chapter of my book, but it might have stayed sealed there forever.
Maybe I would have passed it on to my children. It's cathartic to do that. So that's one way I dealt with it. I was very lucky to have a loving family around me, that there were lots of visits.
I needed some motivation to get better, so the BBC said, "What can we do for you? I wanted to get back to work. BETH -Unbelievably, you were back at work within ten months. Look, this is how I want to do it. We will spend the first day doing the interviews about what happened, then I want to move on and not talk about me anymore and just get back to doing my journalistic job. And the first overseas trip I did, I think the very next month, we went to Geneva to interview Osama bin Laden's half-brother.
He was a perfumer. But I do remember being absolutely exhausted on that trip. It's a short flight, it's what, one hour to Geneva, and I had to lie down when I got there. It took me a year to get my mojo back really. BETH -Obviously it was a hugely traumatic experience. Did you experience anything like post-traumatic stress disorder or any flashbacks? A friend of mine who was filming in the Balkans and somebody died very close to him and he got PTSD 11 years later.
You don't often see it coming, you know, I'm no way complacent about it, but what I did do was I told everybody who came to visit me who wanted to know exactly what had happened. I then wrote a book about it, 'Blood and Sand', and I've not really bottled anything up.
And plus, there's so much to live for. There are so many places I want to go to. There's so much of the world I still want to see. There's so many things I want to do. My kids are such wonderful girls and I'm very lucky to have a lovely girlfriend as well. So, there's lots to live for. BETH -What was it like then with this documentary? Because you really had to revisit everything, didn't you? And you met lots of people along the way who also had similar experiences in terms of recovering from serious injury.
One, Gerard, had much worse injuries than me. Another, Yasmin, had less severe injuries, but was finding it very tough mentally. Ironically, Gerard I think was incredibly robust, although he is a tetraplegic and totally dependent physically on his carer.
He wears his disability very lightly. He's studying Middle Eastern language I think, or Arabic language, at the moment for an MA and he was just full of life and zest. Yasmin was able to walk with assistance, but finding life very difficult and it didn't help I think for her that she lives in a flat right at the top of a load of stairs, and I don't think that she perhaps has had the same family and friends support group around her that I've been lucky enough to have.
But the third person, Matt, is not a spinal injuries person, he is an amputee. He was a Royal Marine and had lost part of his leg from an injury in Brecon Beacons. It wasn't even in action, it was in training, and he's found that very hard to deal with and it's been a huge strain on his marriage and it was really interesting meeting him and his wife and it just illustrated to me that the challenge is as much mental as physical.
The danger that a lot of people fall into is that they become angry and resentful. I could easily have gone down this route I think. It's unhealthy to dwell on what could have been or what you could have done. What's done is done. It's much more interesting to focus on the future. And that psychiatrist, Doctor Neil Greenberg, he said.
Think about all the stuff that you've salvaged, all the things you can still do. Your mind is still there. You've still got most of your body. Focus on future things. I wasn't chosen for any skill, it was more of a kind of symbol that here's this guy who's had huge injuries and he's still skiing. I'm a far better skier now in a sit ski than I was when I was on two legs.
I've cracked it now. BETH -I'm glad you brought up the future because there was another bit in the documentary, and I don't want to give away too much, you go and see Frank Cross. BETH -He's very straightforward in what he says to you, which is basically, "No improvement, Frank, and it's going to get worse as you get older. You might need more care than you would like. So I take great pleasure in continually surprising him. I mean, I think he has been genuinely surprised at how quickly and how far I've recovered.
I keep myself as fit as I can and I think I'm going to keep surprising Frank. I am not going to go down the route that he thinks I am.
BETH -The other thing, the fact that because obviously you weren't using your legs or your hips, the bone density decreased and so you have osteoporosis. Is that something that you have to manage? What I ought to be doing probably more of is standing and walking a bit, but my legs are osteoporotic, that's not going to change. When I was on horseback in Colombia earlier this year, and that's part of it in the film, that's why I made the decision, I need to stop going down this steep ravine now because it's so steep I am going to fall off this horse and my legs will break.
So I called a halt to it then and we found a different way to get down. There have been two times since being shot that I've been really scared.
I was the only guy in a sit ski, I was only disabled person doing it, so I had to compete against Heston Blumenthal, Fiona Bruce, in going down this pretty damn steep slalom.
It was in Courmayeur in Italy and we arrived there two days before the race and for two days it rained and then the day of the race it was minus eight so the slope was like glass and you were allowed one practice run.
I went down it and I lost control and basically fell and skidded all the way down. I was terrified. When I had the second go, I know this is going to eat up a lot of seconds, but I'm going to sideslip carefully down the steepest bit. And they had Graham Bell commentating, "Come on, Frank, you need to commit to this slope.
You've got to go for it. So we should come full circle. So the idea of this film was for you to take a look at what does disability or the disabled life mean to you.
Did you come to a conclusion at the end of it? Did it change your mind set in anyway? It was refreshing and educational to meet the three people that I did. You can't help comparing your own conditions and injuries and I thought that it's kind of ironic that there is Yasmin who is much more mobile than me, but is finding it much tougher mentally and there is Gerard who's much less mobile than me and has got this fantastic spirit and he's got all this ambition to go back to the Middle East.
I mean, we made a pact on camera that a year from now he was going to go back to the Middle East. Well, he's excused that because of Coronavirus. BETH -On camera. Any takeaway moments? Was there anything that stayed with you? FRANK -I've probably blocked out from my mind those really grim days in hospital, the feeling of utter helplessness.
And it was a long way away from home so when my wife and daughters came to visit it was a brief visit and then they were a long way away after that. And I could hear children playing in the corridor and they weren't mine, the thought that I would never again run into the sea with my kids or climb a tree with them and play hide and seek, all of those things.
Of course, the reality is when you come out of hospital you find other ways of doing it and you can still do this stuff in a wheelchair. But at the time it was very, very depressing. It's tempting to feel an enormous wave of self-pity, but I got through that. BETH -In a way was it good for you to revisit after 16 years? He agreed to let cameras follow his daily routine for Being Frank , a BBC Two film that will show how he refuses to let disability get in the way of an active life.
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