Book Review - Looking Up

‘For example, if you were an arsehole before your accident,’ she says in a conspiratorial whisper, ‘you are likely to be an arsehole after.’  The whisper tells me that: a) somewhere on the ward there is an arsehole who has just had a spinal-cord injury, and b) it isn’t me.

1 April 2005 Tim Rushby-Smith falls six metres out of the tree he was working on and breaks his back.  “Looking Up” is the autobiographical account of his life after that event.

Accurately billed as ‘A humorous and unflinching account of learning to live again with sudden disability’ Tim’s book had some laugh out loud moments which contrast with nitty gritty details of spinal cord injury [SCI], brace yourself for numerous bowel movement moments, graphic catheter insertion and pain.

I liked his motivation for writing the book, “There are lots of books about people suffering some kind of serious injury and then going on to extra-ordinary achievement (sport/ adventure etc.). But I found it hard to identify with this kind of thing. I just wanted to get back to my life as best as I could.”

Maybe that makes his story less of a fairytale of triumph over tragedy because he doesn’t end up at the top of Everest, trek across Nicaragua or survive some intrepid Saharan adventure with nought but a sandwich for sustenance…. but for me that’s what made his story feel more real.  He just wanted to get some sort of life back.

This book is the journey of how he attempts to reach that goal.  His life beyond spinal injury slowly comes into focus.  His emphasis on what he can’t do starts to shift to a recognition of the things he could potentially do.  The book is written as a straight narrative interspersed with newsy e mails which Tim says were “to show the more positive ‘official message’ that I wrote at the time and contrast it with the more personal ‘glass half empty’ stuff.

What I found particularly interesting were the dawn of realisation moments – being irked at the ‘b’ word [brave], encountering the bureaucracy of the Disabled Facilities Grant and finding out most pubs are inaccessible – I thought ‘welcome to our world’, a world that has always existed but unless you are in it you don’t really give it a second thought.  As Tim acknowledges, “For an able bodied person, disability is 'the unthinkable”.

Talking of unthinking, there are some great stories of how on numerous occasions he encounters the familiar misguided insight of a non-disabled person, ‘One of the physios tells me about a previous patient. ‘David’s tetraplegic and he’s just done a tandem sky dive jump.  You see, anything’s possible.’  I rather cruelly responded, it not being one of my better, more optimistic days, ‘So can I climb a ladder again, then?’

Tim’s rehabilitation was enormously motivated by the impending arrival of his first child, born five months after his accident, but I’m still left pondering his hypothesis that the way you become disabled can also have an impact, ‘I’ve also noticed that many of those who are engaging with the whole process in a positive way are people who had their accident doing something they love, whether it’s paragliding, horse riding, motorcycling, mountain biking or climbing trees.  I wonder whether knowing there was a risk involved make it psychologically easier to cope with the outcome.’

He may have felt he ‘lost all of the versions of my future that I had imagined for myself.’  But his book shows how he has, with the support of his wife, family and friends, within a few years built a new life for himself and his new family and proving there is life after sudden disability.


“Looking Up” by Tim Rushby-Smith, published by Virgin Books on 10 April 2008, £6.99 paperback, 978 0 753513866.