Doctors told Rachel Finch, 37, an NHS Midwife at Wythenshawe Hospital, that her injuries were consistent with a car or rollercoaster crash
A mum who suffered a catastrophic injury while out running says doctors told her she was lucky not to have lost her leg. Rachel Finch, 37, from Warrington, suffered a ‘freak’ accident during a 14-mile training run with a friend.
The accident happened just weeks before she was due to run the 2023 Chester Marathon. The NHS Midwife who works at Wythenshawe Hospital said: “I was probably running the best I’d ever run. The weather was perfect for running.
“I was with my friend, and we’d just got over just nine miles. It was actually me that changed the route. We were supposed to run round this road, but I said, ‘Oh, shall we cut through there?’”
Rachel suggested to her friend that they take a different route than usual by cutting through the crematorium.
“I always think that was the biggest mistake I made because when we cut through, I tripped over the gate stopper. I didn’t fall as such; I was just stumbling and trying to stop myself from falling over.
“I placed my right leg on the floor really awkwardly and my knee locked. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going to break my knee.’ I thought my knee was going to go backwards. And then the next thing, I was on the floor.”
Rachel didn’t know it at the time, but she’d actually caused a catastrophic injury. A doctor later told her it was something you might see after a car or even a roller coaster accident.
“What had actually happened was my knee had locked in place, and that’s when my femur had literally just punched out the back of my pelvis because there was nowhere else for it to go. So then I collapsed on the floor in a heap,” said Rachel.
Apart from an initial “sharp” pain, Rachel said she didn’t feel anything else.
“I shouted to my friend, who was ever so slightly ahead of me, and said, ‘I can’t get up, I can’t get up.’ But I hadn’t tried to get up. So it was like subconsciously I knew that I couldn’t get up, because I’d not tried and there was no pain anymore.”
Rachel had blogged her who training in the run up to the marathon on social media. Not knowing how seriously she was injured, she asked her friend to take a photograph of her on the ground and thought it would be part of her “marathon story” that they would laugh at eventually.
Rachel said she didn’t feel anything while she was still. But when she tried to move, she felt a “piercing pain” through the centre of her body.
‘If they didn’t get me in soon, there was a potential I’d lose my leg’
After about 20 minutes, a group of people pulled up in their car after becoming concerned when they saw her lying on the ground.
“My friend was trying to get me to get out of the road because I was literally in the entrance to the car park, so no one could get past me. She was trying to tell me to try and drag myself to the side.
“But as soon as I stretched my arms out to pull, I got this piercing pain, so I said, ‘I can’t.’ I think people were more concerned that I was going to get run over because of where I was. So someone had pulled in and pulled their car in front of me so that no one could get past,” said Rachel.
Rachel told her friend not to call an ambulance. Instead, she asked her to ring her dad to pick her up. But when her dad arrived, he realised she was more severely injured and decided to dial 999.
As a low-category emergency, Rachel waited on the floor for two hours. When paramedics finally arrived, she got pain medication and was placed carefully into the ambulance on a board.
She was taken to Warrington Hospital, but following an X-ray, doctors discovered she had broken her pelvis, and she was sent to the specialist trauma unit at Aintree Hospital in Liverpool.
“When I arrived at Aintree, the doctor was waiting for me at the A&E with the consent form,” said Rachel. “It was quite frightening how quickly things were moving. I’m being consented as I’m being walked down the corridor.
“I’m a midwife, so we do emergency surgeries all the time. All I could think was, ‘This is what we do when we have an emergency.’ I was like, ‘Is it that bad?’
“Nobody was really telling me how bad things were, but I think by this point my foot had gone blue. They were worried that the femoral artery was blocked and that I wasn’t getting the correct blood flow to my leg.
“If they didn’t get me in soon, there was a potential I’d lose my leg.”
Rachel remembers being wheeled into the operating theatre still on the board used by the paramedics as the doctor said they didn’t want her to be moved any more than she already had been.
“I remember the theatre being absolute chaos,” said Rachel. “I started vomiting. There were people running around everywhere, noise everywhere. The last thing I remember was the doctor saying, ‘Can we just put the patient to sleep please?’
“And that was the last thing I remember before I woke up.”
Rachel underwent an operation to realign her hip. The following day, she had another operation to repair her pelvis. She spent a month in hospital before finally being allowed to return home, the Manchester Evening News reported.
Her initial recovery was slow and incredibly painful. The nerve damage pain was so intense that Rachel had to go back to hospital for another two weeks.
Three years later, Rachel is healed enough to run again. She is now training for the London Marathon, raising money for Day One, the trauma charity that helped her with emotional and financial support during her recovery. So far she’s raised over £4,300.
“They don’t think it will ever be a hundred percent now because I’ve had lots more surgeries to correct the foot drop,” said Rachel. “But the nerves are still completely dead.”
“As time’s gone on I’ve learned to do more. But I still have very poor awareness of where my leg is and where my foot is. If I can’t see my foot, I sometimes struggle. If I’m carrying something, for example, I trip up really easily because I can’t see my foot.”
She added: “Although I run, I feel sometimes it’s unfair on other people who have more serious injuries, but I feel I am running as a disabled person. It’s an invisible disability. It’s a bit like how I imagine it would feel like to run on a prosthetic limb, only mine’s not a prosthetic limb.”
Rachel said her natural positivity and family support, especially from her teenage son, helped her recovery. Day One trauma charity also helped by helping with her physio costs and putting her in touch with another person who had a similar injury, but from a different accident.
Freak injury
It wasn’t just Rachel and her family who were shocked by the level of injury she sustained while ‘just out running’. Medical staff have also been taken aback when she tells them how she suffered such a horrific injury.
“Doctors couldn’t believe what I’d done,” she said. “Whenever I spoke to a new doctor, they’d be like, ‘So you did this running?’ They were very confused.
“They said the accident itself was a low-impact accident, but I’d come out with a high-impact injury. The injury I’d come out with was an injury that they see more when people have like car accidents or rollercoaster accidents where their knees are pushed back.”
Despite her ordeal, Rachel remains positive about the future, particularly about getting back to running again.
She added: “It’s about adaptation more than improvement. I don’t think things are going to get better than they are now. But I’m back hiking, back running, back at work. I’m happy where I am.
“I do sometimes feel I’m living with a completely invisible disability. People say, ‘Isn’t it great you’re back to running,’ and I’m like, I have recovered well, but it’s not gone away. I’m just learning to live with it.”
You can find out and support Rachel’s charity fundraiser by running the London Marathon here.

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