Why I feel betrayed

AS Michael McGinty lay injured after the Selby rail crash, he experienced pain beyond anything he had ever known. He remembers the relief of hearing drills and cutting noises, of being rolled on to a stretcher and breathing fresh air as he was removed from the train.

At that moment he thought, briefly, that the worst was over. However, his experience in the three years that followed has left him feeling betrayed about the way he and other victims of major accidents are treated.

The crash occurred on a bitterly cold, windy and snowy February morning in 2001, after Gary Hart's Land Rover and trailer ran down the motorway embankment and came to rest on the southbound railway line.

Michael, a London hospital worker who had been visiting his daughter in Newcastle, recalls a terrible bang, like a bomb blast.

"The buffet manager who died screamed and I was thrown backwards with bread rolls hitting me like ping-pong balls.

"A few seconds later I had a feeling that something was not as it should be, and I glanced out of the opposite window thinking, we seem to be rising in the air".

The train begun "a sort of roller-coaster ride" and he slid downwards through a mass of glass and broken objects.

He says: "I finally came to rest, still spread out with my arms in front of me and my face looking at the sky. There was no sound at all, just like I had experienced when I visited Belsen concentration camp.

"The pain was now unbearable. My boots had been ripped off and it had felt as if my feet were going with them."

Recalling his thoughts after the rescue team moved him to a barn close to the crash site, Michael says: "I was outside breathing fresh air. I was still desperately cold but I was out. I did not know it then but this was the beginning of the kind of pain that no innocent victim should ever be asked to take.

"One of the ambulance team started to talk to me and I said I was very cold. He told me they had no blankets left. He started to rip what was left of my shirt and it was hurting like hell. I asked him to stop and he told me to 'shut the **** up' and continued to rough handle me."

When another ambulance worker asked who needed a blanket, a voice from the same team said: "That grey-haired old man over there, but he is going to die anyway."

Michael was oblivious to that comment but it was overheard by Wendy Keenan, a 35-year-old doctor's practice manager from Blyth, who was lying injured.

She was shocked, especially as she cannot speak highly enough of the attention she received herself.

Michael, an extremely fit 61-year-old former soldier, who had run a marathon in under four hours just three months previously, says: "When I was told that later, I remember thinking, I don't deserve this, how can decent people do this to me?"

It wasn't the last time he was to fear that there was little hope.

He suffered complex shoulder fractures and his face and scalp were pitted with glass in the crash. During his first few days in hospital at Pinderfields, Wakefield, several official counsellors came in.

One, who told Michael he was from a university, sat there and never spoke. Another, brought in by the hospital, looked at him for a few minutes, burst out crying and left.

It contrasted starkly with the behaviour of two auxiliary nurses who came to his bedside late one night and held his hands.

"They told me to talk and that they would listen. This was my fondest memory of the hospital and it is what I believe should happen to all victims: counselling should come at a much later stage."

Michael's cousin suggested that he should go and stay with her in Lanarkshire, Scotland and that progress might be better with the help of doctors at the local medical centre where she worked.

Despite the constant pain, things looked a lot brighter. His daughter arrived from the USA with one of his grandchildren, and he was in comfortable surroundings.

But his problems were really just beginning.

His blood pressure kept going up and at the end of June, four months after the crash, he was admitted to hospital overnight to try to bring it down.

"A consultant came on to the ward and when he saw me he just said 'Mr McGinty, you are going to die. Maybe not just yet, but you will, and even if I operate, you will never get better.' As he was saying this he was walking away from me.

"Everyone in the ward heard him and the nurse said he was sorry, but he had to discharge me. My blood pressure was 210/115 usually it is around 130/70 and they still put me on to the street.

"A week later I wrote a six-page letter to the consultant and told him my history, that I had been a soldier for 20 years and had never taken any sick days, and that I was not a drug abuser nor an alcoholic.

"I did feel a little bit ashamed about mentioning drugs and drink, because nobody should have been treated like I had been in this hospital. He answered with a small apology."

Michael had an operation a few weeks later and it was successful although the pain was still there and his blood pressure dropped too.

About nine months after the crash he returned to work, part-time. After two weeks, the human resources department told him that he was not well enough to carry on. A hand-written note from the finance department told him: "You will be going on half-pay immediately and as we have no proper forms you will have to get in touch with the DHSS yourself." The note was unsigned.

He contacted the hospital's chief executive and, following a meeting, was put back on full pay. He was also put forward for medical retirement in November 2001.

This never happened and, one year after the accident, his pay was stopped and he had only his Army pension to live on.

The situation dragged on for more than a year. Only after hiring a lawyer to help him Michael did receive his medical retirement last September.

His lawyer has continually sent him to visit various consultants for his side and for the "other side" - the insurers representing Gary Hart, who are responsible for paying compensation to the victims.

He said: "I have been to Harley Street and various private medical establishments and feel like a doll; everyone seems to want a piece of me or a piece of any money I might be receiving.

"I am so fed up with it all that I just feel like giving up. I have spoken to other victims who feel the same way."

If that sounds like a man who feels sorry for himself, the notion is dispelled when you talk to him on any other subject - whether it's his football team Celtic, his higher education studies at Aberystwyth, where he has started a degree in politics, or his attempts to re-build his physical fitness.

He is speaking out for the first time because he believes that the real victims of disasters such as the Selby crash are often forgotten. "I just wanted to be taken care of like a human being," he says. "People in this country should be made more responsible for their duties to fellow humans and should not be influenced by media and television crews.

"When the media have had their fill and moved on to other things, victims need to be monitored. We should not be left to rot and be treated like dogs just because the film crews have gone.

"I make no apologies for saying this, as this is what actually happens and people need to be made aware of it."

More than three years after the accident he is still seeing consultants and he may need to have more surgery on his shoulder.

Wendy Keenan, who still suffers constant headaches, has also been subjected to checks by Hart's insurers, who seem determined to prove that she has gone back to work.

Neither Michael nor Wendy have yet received any compensation.

One question the insurers continually ask is how Michael can undertake a university degree if he is not fit to work.

He says: "I never said I was too ill to work, I wanted to do something useful. "They are continually digging into my life, trying to embarrass me, and find out if I am a bad person.

"What difference does all this make in a train crash that was not the fault of the victims?

"It would seem that victims of this type of disaster are the last to be really looked after: lawyers, consultants and many others are all taking their piece of the cake and we are left to pick up the crumbs.

"Why, in major accidents, do the authorities and the law allow the gravy train to roll on, with certain institutions lining their pockets, and the victims put through a humiliating amount of pressure in order for these people to have great financial gain."

Michael's case has been taken up by David Wiltshire, the Conservative MP for Spelthorne in Middlesex.

Updated: 10:06 Friday, August 06, 2004