A MUM broke her neck after belly flopping into a garden pool.
Gemma Allinson forked out £400 on a 14ft pool for her kids to enjoy during the summer months and was happy to join in playing in the water.
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Footage shows the mum-of-three “messing around” and gently belly flopping into the shallow water alongside her children.
Moments – doing the exact same manoeuvre – she suffered a devastating injury.
On her last leap, Gemma broke her neck on impact.
She suffered a cardiac arrest, leaving her kids horrified when she remained face-down in the water.
Her eldest son Cameron Todd, now 20, had been eating his tea when Gemma’s youngest daughter Daisy Allinson came inside to tell him his mum was not moving or talking in the pool.
Cameron rushed out to the garden and immediately tried to grab his mum out of the water while Gemma’s 10-year-old son Alfie Allinson ran to fetch neighbours to help.
With the help of neighbours, Cameron fished his mum out of the water and began CPR, before someone took over so he could call an ambulance and sprint to get a defibrillator from the nearby community centre.
Thankfully, an ambulance arrived within the next 10 minutes and the now 42-year-old was rushed to Hull Royal Infirmary where doctors discovered she had fractured her C5 vertebrae in her cervical spine and had water in her lungs.
After a four-week-stint in hospital, the stay-at-home mum underwent a life-saving op to remove the broken bone and insert a cage secured by two plates and two screws in the back of her neck to support it.
She then was moved to Pinderfields Hospital in Wakefield where she spent six months slowly recovering and learning how to walk, eat and go to the bathroom herself.
After reading her doctor’s notes, Gemma now knows she had no pulse and was “dead” for more than two minutes.
Now two years on from the horror accident on July 19th 2022, Gemma wears a leg brace and uses a mobility scooter to get around.
She’s now urging people to be careful when jumping into cold and shallow water this summer.
Gemma, from Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire, said: “I was just messing about and the next day I woke up with a tube down my throat.
“I didn’t know where the hell I was, what I was doing or what had happened. It was awful. I remember waking up, I just cried.
“You shouldn’t really be jumping in shallow water, I’ve learned that lesson. Especially adults, it won’t matter for kids because they’re a bit smaller.
“But I think grown men and grown women shouldn’t really be jumping in a pool because they’re hard underneath. A bang to your head, a bang to your body, you’ve damaged yourself.
“I couldn’t move. There were tubes down my throat and tubes down my nose, oxygen. I had a central line in my groin.
“They [doctors] didn’t think I was going to be alive, they didn’t think I was going to walk again.
“It was touch and go when I was really poorly because of the injury in my spine and my neck.
“I had to learn to do everything again. I had to learn to eat, walk, look after myself, get dressed, wash myself.
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“I had a nose tube in to feed because I couldn’t eat.
“I had a catheter in for a good five months so I had to learn to go to the toilet myself properly, get showers on my own, wash my hair on my own, brush my teeth.
“Everybody had to do that for me because I couldn’t use my hands.”
Gemma now suffers weakness down the right side of her body, and because she is right-handed, she had to learn how to do everything with her left hand.
Her right foot still doesn’t move as well as the left one, making it tricky for Gemma to walk properly and she relies on crutches to be able to go up and down stairs.
She also experiences constant burning, tingling and numbness in her legs and uses a mobility scooter when out and about.
Although it’s been hard, Gemma says her children have helped her remain positive during recovery and her eldest son Cameron is now her legal carer.
It took Gemma’s family a year to throw the pool away because nobody wanted to go near it after the near-fatality.
Gemma said: “Before my accident I had no health problems, I was fit as a fiddle.
“I used to run around in my car and do the school run. You name it, I did everything.
“I’ve just learned to do that again but in a different way because I’m on crutches now and I’ve got a splint on my leg that I have to wear every day.
“It’s harder to live really, I just carry on. It’s not nice.
“My kids have really helped me through my recovery and being able to soldier on with things.
“It’s been a tough ride but I’ve done it all by myself. The kids keep me going.
“They remember it all, they were so scared and worried. It was just awful, I cried every day.
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“My whole life’s changed. You either learn to live with it or you don’t and because I’ve got kids I’ve learned to live with it because of them.
“They’ve had to learn to live my life and to help and to be supportive.
“It’s been hard, they’ve been good as gold, they understand.
“I was an independent person before, I did everything myself before, so I wanted to be that person again.
“It was awful to lose that part of myself. Everyone was doing everything for me in hospital and I didn’t want them to do it, I wanted to do it myself.
“The only way to do it myself was to learn and be positive and just try and I did.”
Since the accident, the ligaments in Gemma’s knee no longer work and she wears a leg brace and uses a mobility scooter.
Gemma desperately wanted to be able to drive again so retook her driving test in a mobility car and can now do the school run again.
Recently she was able to take her children on holiday to Butlins on her own and even go swimming with them.
Even though she cannot swim in deep water, and needs help getting into the pool, this is something Gemma never would have been able to imagine herself doing two years ago.
Gemma said: “It’s great because I don’t depend on anybody.
“If I can do it the way I am, then anyone can do it basically. It’s hard going but I’ve learned to live like this.
“I can’t do half the stuff I used to do but I give it a good go.
“You’ve just got to stay positive. You’ve just got to carry on and keep your mindset as positive as you can and just keep going.
“When I was in hospital there were people coming in with pool injuries. I wasn’t the only one.
“You see these people putting pools up and they’re jumping in and having fun. I can’t knock that because that’s exactly how I was, having fun.
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“But when I see it now, I’m like don’t do that, don’t jump in like that.
“It’s just a reminder of what I’ve done but all you can say is just be careful.”
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