Amy Pohl: ‘I thought, one day I’ll wake up and everything will be better. Unfortunately, that day never came.’ Photograph: Mark Pinder/The Guardian
In autumn 2017, Pohl, a teacher at Rugby Free primary school in Warwickshire, had been feeling run down. Her sore throat was diagnosed as adult croup and she was treated at University Hospital Coventry. While there, she had an allergic reaction to an anaesthetising spray and was rushed into ICU. Not long after her admission, Pohl says, a doctor failed to insert her cannula correctly, and used the same needle again on the second try.
She would soon realise why. “There is a scale that says it is the most painful condition you can have,” she says. “Higher than childbirth. Higher than amputation of a digit without anaesthetic.”Pain came to Pohl in many forms. “It felt like my bones were going through a meat grinder. And I had ants that had been set on fire, with knives for legs, pulling on my arm.” When the pain was most intense, she had to take 12 oral doses of morphine a day.
Pohl was then moved to a psychiatric ward, where she thinks she spent around four months – she can’t be sure because she has “blurred a lot of it out. They kind of just left us all to ourselves, sadly,” she says. “So we all became each other’s therapists. We had this table in there, and we would all sit and draw together.” Many patients have remained friends. “It wasn’t the best place to recover, but we made it work together.
“Why sit in a bed crying, ‘Why me? Why didn’t I stop this? It’s all my fault!’ when you could be getting out of bed and living your life, even though it’s not the life you always planned you were going to have?” she says. “You still have a life. And maybe someone else doesn’t. So value what you do have.”When the first lockdown started in March 2020, she was moved to a rehabilitation centre in County Durham, more than a three-hour drive from family and friends. “I was on a two-week quarantine.
Much of this Pohl does with a smile on her face, but her videos are confiding as well as comical. In one, she confronts the commenters who complain that she’s taking a wheelchair from someone else who needs it. In others, she takes issue with a branch ofFor several years, Pohl assumed that she would recover from CRPS and return to her old life. “I thought, one day I’ll wake up and everything will be better. Unfortunately,” she says, “that day never came.
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