A second year student was rushed to A&E after a fall on the walk home from a nightclub.
He suffered a bleed on the brain, a fractured skull and a broken collarbone, and now his mum has ordered him to wear a cycle helmet on nights out.
She said: “I’d give him a clip round the ear if he hadn’t taken a blow to the head, from now on he’s wearing a cycle helmet on nights out.”
Richard Winter, an Economics and Finance undergraduate, spent 2 days in hospital after tripping over a railing whilst chasing his housemate home from Kuda in the early hours last Wednesday morning.
Despite intitially visiting A&E early on Wednesday morning, housemates rushed him back to hospital after he was sent home when Mr. Winter started “speaking back to front” and “couldn’t open his left eye”.
Richard was chasing a friend home when he tripped on a railing by the Shell Garage at the junction between Hull Road and Lawrence Street.
“I was knocked unconscious.” Richard recalls, “I grazed my back, smacked my head and ****ed up my shoulder. Don’t know how I did all three.”
Someone saw Richard fall and posted about the accident on Yik Yak but none of his friends did. This led one of them to believe Richard lying on the ground was a joke, Snapchatting a picture of his friend passed out on the road with the caption: “get up ahahaha”.
Richard’s memory of the fateful night is hazy, but he tried to piece together the timeline of events as he remembers it: “I’ve got a bit of memory when I caught my foot on the railing and I knew I had fucked it. I remember coming to after the fall, because I remember getting put in the ambulance.
“The gas and air made me feel sick and then I remember standing up against the wall having an X-ray done and being in agony. A&E couldn’t wait to get rid of us. They kept on telling us to stop swearing.”
Richard wasn’t entirely happy with the service provided by A&E: “They didn’t give me any painkillers or anything. They didn’t check my head. They just told me to come back if I had any symptoms to do with my head injury.”
“I got home at 7.30am, woke up at 11am. I was so confused, I couldn’t keep my left eye open, I was speaking back to front, I went downstairs, felt really sick and threw up in the sink and then my mate drove me back to” A&E.
Upon returning to the hospital, a head scan revealed that Richard had fractured his skull. “Turns out I was kind of lucky, the accident could have killed me.”
When York Vision visited Richard at hospital, he had been there for 48 hours, and was complaining about the lack of things to do.
“Having to be still in bed is the worst thing,” he said.
“I’ve got my laptop but there’s no internet, and the TV is rubbish, it costs £10 a day and is black and white, it’s so crap.
“The codeine is good though, I feel all woozy, but when it wears off, my shoulder kills.”
“Laying down my head feels like cotton wool but if I stand up the room starts to spin.”
It will be six weeks before his shoulder heals, up to ten days before the pain in his head will go, and then it will be months before the fracture on the side of his head is fully healed.
Having spoken to his supervisor, the University has told Richard they can authorise him up to four weeks of absence. Otherwise he will have to redo his penultimate year.
If the pain is bearable enough, Richard is hoping to return to lectures within a week.
Despite everything, Richard seemed cheerful, still sporting the Kuda stamp on his wrist that got him into so much trouble in the first place: “I thought I was Superman trying to hurdle the fence.”
Richard was discharged from hospital on Saturday, and returned home to his family home in Doncaster to aid his recovery.