Walking had always seemed effortless. Until I lost the skill

I had been the victim of a truck going too fast on a dirt road. It flipped, I fell out and was left with multiple broken bones including a burst vertebrae. I spent two months in hospital, lying flat. Then one day, I was told to get up and walk.

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Although year-on-year, the numbers are falling, road trauma in Victoria is horrendous. In 2022, the state recorded 240 deaths as we have hit the roads – sometimes literally – after the confines of pandemic lockdowns. But the number of serious injuries is far higher. In the 12 months to May 31 last year, the TAC processed 5183 claims involving hospitalisation. In fact, this is a drop on the five-year annual average of 7270. But behind those numbers: pain, disfigurement, disability, and post-traumatic stress. How many people are unable to ever run, skip, jump, love or laugh again? Lives forever changed. A road toll that, indeed, none of us ever want to pay.

Many people told me I was lucky to be able to learn to walk again. And so, I tried to tell myself, as I shuffled on, the pain shooting up my spine, flinching under the loud voice of the physiotherapist: “I don’t think you’re trying hard enough.” The blessed relief of standing in water, supporting my jagged bones. I wanted to be like a Dalek, suspended in fluid, enclosed in a protective cocoon, instead groping for my wheelchair desperately to get back to my bed and lie down. But yes, baby steps, I took them and eventually the pace quickened.

There’s another saying: don’t run before you can walk. In my case, it’s more just don’t run.

However, in an attempt to encourage some fitness, I turned to the fine example of my elderly father, who had resumed his youthful pleasure in athletics after he retired from his desk job.

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The first time I learned to race walk was with him. In his 70s, he gave up running marathons and turned his attention to that graceful art of never lifting more than one foot off the ground while flying past more casual dawdlers. I consider myself in the latter category, and am rather ashamed to admit that a man in his 90s left me choking in his dust as he raced on by in a competition walk.

Sometimes willpower is just not enough. As I watched my children learn to connect their brains with their feet, unfortunately I also observed the reverse happen to my mother. A victim of Alzheimer’s disease, she gradually collapsed inside her addled self. She couldn’t walk upstairs, then she couldn’t walk far. Then, after a fall, she couldn’t walk at all. And there was no way she was ever going to learn to walk again.

Yes, a journey can start with a single step, but sometimes we lose balance through no fault of our own and fall over.

Jocelyn Suiter is an Age producer.

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