A teenager who had her legs crushed by a metal beam in a scrapyard is urging other young people not to play in dangerous places where they shouldn’t be.
Taylor Knight from Edinburgh, who is now 18, has been told doctors feared she would die or lose a leg as a result of the accident in summer 2022.
She has faced a lengthy and intensive period of recovery.
She told STV News: “It’s been quite a slow process. I was in a wheelchair for quite a while and then I stopped using the wheelchair in January, February.
“I’ve been on crutches since, but I’m trying my best not to use the crutches.”
Taylor and two friends had sneaked into the yard in the Granton area by climbing over a wall.
Disaster struck when a large H beam ended up on top of her legs, leaving her trapped.
“As soon as I felt it on my legs, I started to lose the feeling in my legs,” she said. “By the time the emergency services got here my legs were completely numb.
“I don’t know why, but I was thinking ‘I’ll just get up, walk out of the scrapyard and go home.’
“It was at the point where they’d lifted the H beam up, pulled me backwards out of it, I was still lying on the floor and they told me I’d broken my legs.”
Taylor needed surgery which lasted more than 12 hours.
Although the operation was successful, she later learned it had been touch and go.
She added: “When I got out of hospital, I was told by my parents that they’d been told I wasn’t going to make it through the surgery and that I could have had my right leg amputated because of how bad the injuries were.”
With scars from that surgery, Taylor has a reminder every day of what happened – but knows the outcome could have been much worse.
“I just kept thinking to myself ‘why did I do it, why did I go into the scrapyard,” she said.
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