Poledance accident victim Debbie Plowman home with family at last

By By Mike Laycock  Chief reporter

MOTHER-OF-TWO Debbie Plowman has finally returned home – just in time to spend Christmas with her children – two years after she was paralysed in a pole dancing exercise class accident.
Debbie, 33, of Haxby, who has two young children, Jack, seven, and Ruby, four, suffered devastating injuries when she fell just before Christmas in 2009, breaking her neck and severely damaging her spinal cord.
She spent almost a year in the spinal injury unit at the Northern General Hospital in Sheffield and then another year in the Lascelles neurological rehabilitation unit in Harrogate. In March, she returned home for the first time since the accident, spending several hours there, using a specially designed wheelchair, and she even managed to go out for a drink in a local pub.
But now she has been able to come home for good after her husband Chris bought and adapted a bungalow in Haxby to make it suitable for her, although she will need round-the-clock nursing care for the foreseeable future.
Chris said: “It’s fantastic to finally have Debbie back home, especially for her to be back in time to have been with the family at Christmas.”
Some of the thousands of pounds raised through the Debbie Plowman Happy Faces Trust, a registered charity set up after the accident, has been used to buy equipment to make life easier for her away from the rehabilitation unit.
The fund has also paid for sophisticated equipment enabling her to communicate with friends and relatives by sending text messages through eye movements.
Money from the charity also goes to Spinal Research UK, the Lascelles unit and the Osborne Spinal Unit at Sheffield Northern General.
The couple thanked the thousands of people who have supported the charity through a series of events, including sportsmen’s dinners at York Racecourse, Three Peaks walks, five-a-side matches, pampering evenings and golf days at Sandburn Hall.
They said: “We can’t thank people enough for everything they have done to support us and raise money for the Trust. We can’t think of a more worthwhile cause.
“People need to know that brain and spinal injuries are far more common than people think, but it is probably not spoken about. A new US survey estimates that one in every 50 people suffers from a brain or spinal injury at some time, a figure that most will find hard to believe.”