A trip to the pub almost cost Conor his leg

Celebrations turned to suffering for student who faced losing a limb after taking a tumble.

Conor Mackie looked forward to a big night out four years ago. It had been planned to help him celebrate the end of his exams at Sheffield University.

But an evening of celebration turned into an ongoing nightmare for the young student. He ended up in hospital with the threat of losing his leg.

On the way home from the pub with some pals, Conor, from East Kilbride, had clambered over a fence in an attempt to find a shortcut.

“It’s daft to think about it now, but I didn’t realise how big the drop was on the other side,” he recalled.

“In the dark, it seemed as if the ground was only a few feet below. It must have looked like a sketch from a comedy movie. I jumped over a small fence and dropped down more than 20 feet. I managed to hit a tree, then a concrete ledge, then fell into some water.”

As he lay in a stream, Conor immediately felt a bit daft and a great deal of pain. Something had gone wrong in his knee.

“I realised I had dislocated it. Things popped back into place as I stood up again,” he added. “I managed to get to the concrete ledge by the water to wait for the emergency services.

“Because it was an awkward location, it took two hours for me to be winched to safety. I was soaking wet and it was January so I count myself, lucky, really.”

At the hospital, medics discovered Conor had snapped both his anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments in the centre of his knee.

These ligaments help control motion in the knee and injury to them is catastrophic when it comes to even bending a knee.

Much of the soft knee tissue had been destroyed beyond repair. Conor had to face up to the prospect of never having full motion in his knee again.

“The surgeons had to take some tendons from other parts of my knee and reattach them to strengthen the area. But within a year my leg became incredibly painful due to arthritis brought on by the injury.”

There were two options surgeons could either fuse his knee, meaning it wouldn’t bend again, or attempt further surgery. The latter choice would have involved grafting a donor knee on the joint.

However surgeons said there was a strong chance that the operation would fail and that his leg would be lost.

“I wasn’t looking forward to that,” laughed Conor. “One of the options was an artificial knee which my body could reject.”

At the moment Conor is waiting to see if his leg improves. Of course, he still regrets jumping over that unremarkable fence four years ago.

“I’d played lacrosse for my local team and I’d hoped to play at university too,” said Conor. “But that’s no longer possible. I also can’t play football. I can swim and cycle but it still causes me some pain.

“I worked in a bar at the time and would have loved to have kept doing it, but I have to keep off my feet as much as possible. If I could go back in time I’d warn myself to not go near any fences for a start!”