London - When world-renowned flautist Sir James Galway fell down the stairs, badly breaking his left wrist and shattering his right elbow, he feared his career could be over.
But the musician, who made his name with a classical repertoire, found the solution in a very modern technology - the Nintendo Wii games console.
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Belfast-born Sir James had his accident early on a December morning in 2009, a fortnight after his 70th birthday.
After waking in his house near Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, at 4.30am with his mind racing, he made his way out of his bedroom, along an unlit corridor and into his music room to write two letters that had been preoccupying him.
The task completed, he walked towards the dark corridor leading to his bedroom, but took a step to the left and pitched headlong down 13 wooden stairs, each with a metal rim.
“I didn’t have my glasses on,” he says. “Who knows what damage I’d have done to my face if I’d been wearing them?”
As he plunged down the stairs, Sir James tried to twist his body so he didn’t land face first. “I was conscious of protecting my teeth. But the natural instinct is to put out your arms to lessen the impact of the fall.”
The result was a fractured left wrist and a broken and dislocated right elbow. He was bleeding from two cuts to his head.Somehow, he managed to stagger back up the stairs, stumble to the bathroom and call for his wife, Jeanie.
“I was just so relieved that Jimmy had been strong enough to brace himself as he fell,” says Jeanie. “He could so easily have flipped over and broken his neck.”
Even so, she was taking no chances and insisted her husband have an MRI scan of his head - it took half-an-hour and revealed no damage.
However, an X-ray showed the bone in his right elbow that allows the lower arm to bend had been badly broken.
Sir James’s future ability to hold a flute at the correct angle would hinge on the surgeon’s skill in restoring mobility to the shattered joint.
During a two-hour operation, five titanium screws, each about one-and-a-half inches long, were inserted in the elbow, with the hope that the shattered bones would knit together around them. His left wrist was put in a cast.
Within a week, Sir James was having therapy on his right arm.
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