My foot was literally hanging off in the wrong direction with the bone sticking out. I gripped my leg above the injured up area thinking that if I’d severed any major veins or arteries I didn’t fancy bleeding out.
As I’d slid down the road, I instinctively tried to stop myself and I took all the skin off my fingertips and some of upper leg.
My brother heard the crash and came back shouting ‘Steve!’. He got off his bike and ran around shouting ‘Emergencia!’ trying to get a shop owner to call an ambulance.
Some unknown bloke whether he was a shop owner or a passer-by ran over with a big cold bottle of water. This felt like it was probably the best thing anyone could have done for me at that moment in time. I never really got much chance to thank him for it. Or maybe I did. I was probably in some form of shock already.
I already had flashes of things to think about. Will Tony get a photo, will I walk again? What happened to the bike? What happened to the other person? None of them really stuck in my mind long enough for me to ask anything about them.
As it was, Tony did get the 35mm camera out but he only got one photo before the ambulance arrived, which was really quite quickly.
I was put in a neck brace, a leg brace and carted off with Tony to the main public hospital on the other side of the island in Ibiza Town.
There was emergency action taken to re-position my ankle and then I was given a drip and left for maybe as much as an hour before some stitching was done on my tendons and some other stuff was done. Including sewing my tendons together or something that was excruciatingly painful 3 times, even with some sort of supposed painkiller. The following day I had an operation to screw a plate to my bones.

Some of the time spent in hospital was very unpleasant. One night I crawled to the nurse station in agony and I think I pleaded for help but I wasn’t given any and I just had to crawl back to a shared room with some German guy. After about four or five days in hospital I returned to the UK. I had 10 weeks off work. Even though I was on painkillers it was still rubbish.
I went to physiotherapy and had various assessments. I ended up being told there wasn’t anything else that could be done apart from having it fused or having an artificial one that wouldn’t have a very long durability. Neither were options for me. I was told it would progressively get worse.
Not a day passes without pain, but it is immeasurably worse if I have been doing lots of walking or activity the previous day.
There was a legal claim through the travel insurance but I got a pitiful amount of money by any standards. It was only about £15k. About £7k of that was used to bail my brother out of his mortgage payments and of course I never got any of it back. He would just go on to abuse my generosity and sympathy for more years to come.
The situation could have been much, much worse but it has still been a life-changing injury. I can’t run anymore and I have quite limited movement in my left ankle. I have Traumatic Arthritis and is can affect the sorts of things I can do or commit to.
If I’d known it was never going to get better I’d have pushed for much more money, but it’s just old history now.
It’s something I have to live with and so far it hasn’t got noticeably or progressively worse. I don’t know how it will change over time, but as I get older I’m sure I’ll notice the ongoing repercussions and limitations of the injury more and more.