'He has never said sorry'

The 25-year-old football fanatic felt life was not worth living after the horrific crash which resulted in the amputation and which left his friend Endy Singh with 80 per cent of the muscle ripped out of one of his legs.

Before the accident, life could not have been any better for both friends who worked together on the same administrative team at lifts and escalator manufacturing and service firm Kone PLC in Worth Bridge Road, Keighley.

Endy, 28, had been married for six months and was looking forward to celebrating his first wedding anniversary in Singapore.

They were enjoying work and playing football together three times a week for Skipton Town Football Club and their firm's five-a-side team.

But as the pair left work for lunch on December 20, a Toyota MR2 driven by their colleague William Allen ploughed into them and everything changed.

Just the night before, Endy and Mark had played football with their firm's five-a-side team with Allen. Less than 24 hours later, as Endy lay unconscious on the ground with blood pouring from him, Mark feared his friend was dead.

But it was Mark who admits that, later, there were times when he wished he himself had not survived.

"I asked my girlfriend a couple of times to kill me when I was at the lowest I felt," he said.

"It felt terrible to look my girlfriend in the eyes and say I don't want to be here. She has been very good to me."

Mark, of Glenhurst Grove, Keighley, was admitted to Airedale with broken shin bones. The skin on his left leg from his knee to his foot had been ripped off.

An operation to graft muscle from his right thigh on to his lower left leg followed. It was to be one of 13 operations he has had to endure.

Nine weeks after the accident and faced with further muscle grafts from his thigh and even back and side - with no guarantee of success - the decision was made to amputate.

"It crushed me," said Mark. "I was always active. I was getting infections daily and feeling more and more like death each day. So we came to the decision that my leg had to go.

"They left me for four days to think about it. I was 24 and I thought that was it. I had spent 24 years of my life walking around and it took just weeks for my body to stop working. When they told me, I said just get on with it'. It was the worst time ever. I went down for the operation knowing I had made the right decision.

"When I came round after the operation I thought I had made the worst decision of my life. I burst into tears. I felt my life was over. I have lost friends but I have never felt anything that hit me so hard in my life."

Mark, who spent three months in hospital, has had to come to terms with an artificial limb.

He has fought off the superbug MRSA, endured more treatment and operations to remove kidney stones and survived an allergic reaction to a drug.

Even now he is still struggling to come to terms with the few seconds that changed his life.

"I wake up some days and I don't want to get out of bed," he said. "I don't want to struggle - I just want to lie there. I feel trapped. Before this happened I lived at home but I was never at home. Now it's hard to be there every day with everyone fussing. I can't even remember what my normal life involved."

Endy, whose leg will remain disfigured for the rest of his life, has had to learn to walk again and is now working towards the day when he can step outside without a walking aid. In the early hours after the accident he was also facing amputation.

"I think my left leg was caught in the car as I was flung so the muscle stayed in the car," he said. "They mentioned amputation to me straight away."

After several nights in a high dependency unit and a nine-hour operation which saw 100 per cent of his left lower leg grafted with new skin, surgeons managed to save his leg.

After spending six weeks in hospital he was discharged in a wheelchair to his home in Westburn Avenue, Keighley, facing the fact he would never regain feeling in the leg and a daily regime of dressing changes for the rest of his life.

"The surgeon I had was amazing," he said. "He came in on Christmas Day and at New Year on his days off to see how we were doing. It was my first experience of the NHS and I could not fault it.

"I was always pretty upbeat. I was still alive. Someone had saved my life and they had saved my leg - unlike what Mark had to go through. As awful as the pain was, you forget about the pain.

"The most difficult thing for me was that it was my first Christmas as a married man. Our first anniversary was in May. We had booked to go to Singapore but we had to cancel."

He can now get about his home unaided but needs crutches or a walking stick when he goes outside.

Less visible, but ever present for both men, is the psychological impact. The friends are both undergoing counselling in the hope they will one day be able to return to work - only yards from where the accident happened.

"There's no way you can avoid going back to the scene," said Mark. "That's four times a day you have to go past where your life changed. I resent that day. That's the day my life ended."

Both lads have been invited to return to Skipton FC to coach but they know they will never play for their side again. "They still wanted us to be involved in the club but it breaks your heart," said Mark. "It cuts so deep."

Returning to work would also mean facing Allen again - something neither of them feels able to do yet.

Endy said: "The hardest thing to come to terms with is the way Allen has been dealt with it. He has never said sorry and now would be 12 months too late.

"The doctors have ruled out any sporting activities for me. We can not do 100 per cent the things we did previously. I don't think we will ever come to terms with what happened."

e-mail: fiona.evans @bradford.newsquest.co.uk