“Please, somebody help me. My name is Sarah. I don’t want to die.” Those were the words Sarah de Lagarde screamed repeatedly as she lay on the tracks of the Northern Line at High Barnet Tube station in north London in September last year. She was rapidly losing blood. Her right arm and leg had been crushed by two trains after she’d slipped, lost her balance and fallen between the train and the platform. It was 15 minutes before anybody helped her.
Sarah, now 45, had left the office of Janus Henderson, the asset management firm where she works as global head of communications, later than usual that Friday evening. Life felt good. The previous month she had climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with her husband, Jeremy, 43, and taken her daughters, 9 and 13, to the Shambala music festival in Northamptonshire where the family had dressed up in sequins and flower garlands. That afternoon she had submitted her PhD application: her proposed subject was how emergency service teams communicate in a crisis — in a cruel twist, she was about to become her own case study.
She wanted to get home to finish packing for her family; they were booked to fly to Frankfurt to celebrate her father’s 70th birthday the next morning. When she left her office on Bishopsgate at 9pm, it was raining heavily. She tried in vain to book an Uber. Then, in a moment that will forever play out in her mind, she gave up and walked to Moorgate to take the Northern Line home to Camden Town. The journey is six stops, 11 minutes in total. She was exhausted from having had Covid the previous week and dozed off as the train rattled its way through the stations. She woke up 10 stops too late at the end of the line.
“I remember waking up with a jolt and thinking, ‘Oh no, I’m in the wrong place,” Sarah says. Disorientated, she stepped onto High Barnet’s near-deserted open-air platform. Cold rain fell on her face. As she tried to get her bearings, she realised she needed to get back on the same train to return to Camden Town. She was wearing flat shoes and remembers that “the platform was wet and I could see the light mirrored in the water”. At 9.54pm she walked towards the train and lost her footing.
The gap between the train and platform edge at High Barnet does not look like it could fit a grown woman. Sarah can’t remember the fall. “It happened so quickly,” she says. On CCTV footage it plays out like a magician’s vanishing act: one second she’s there, in a bright pink coat, the next she’s gone.
Sarah broke her front teeth and her nose and blacked out. Thankfully she didn’t come into contact with the power line “or I’d be dead”. Walking through the train, the Tube driver found her laptop bag wedged between the platform and the train but he didn’t look down. If he had, he would have seen her lying on the tracks.
When she came round, she could taste blood in her mouth and feel it running down her face. All she could make out was a narrow strip of light. “I had the overriding thought that I’m not supposed to be here,” she says. “This is really dangerous. I need to get out of here.”
At 10pm the train departed the platform. Her right arm was lying over the tracks and the train severed the bone and muscle, leaving it attached only by skin. Somehow she remained conscious. After the train left she remembers “looking at my arm, and I couldn’t move it. And I instinctively knew that it was gone.” She tried to keep calm. “I can’t remember feeling any pain at all,” she says, but she was losing blood from a deep, star-shaped gash on the back of her right thigh.
A few weeks earlier she’d hiked to the summit of Kilimanjaro in temperatures of minus 20C, with howling winds and a period of total darkness. Now she imagined she was back on the mountain, with every fibre of her body being pushed to the limit. “During that walk I told myself, OK, I need to take it really slowly and be calm and confident: I can do this. That’s what happened when I was lying on the tracks.” She looks me directly in the eye. “I didn’t panic. I remember focusing on my heart rate and trying to reduce it,” she says. “I remember thinking, ‘I didn’t climb to the top of Kilimanjaro just to die in a ditch.’ "
When she looked sideways through the dark, she could make out her phone a few feet away. She crawled to retrieve it but was unable to unlock it using face recognition — it was too dark, her face too bloody. She tried to type in the code: it wouldn’t work.
She began to despair: “I knew the next train would be coming soon.” At 10.05pm she saw lights getting closer and heard the ear-splitting screech of metal. She tried to move out of the way, huddling against the platform wall. “That was really quite frightening,” she says. “I remember the noise and the massive black wheels.” The second train ran over her right foot and remained in the platform on top of her. She continued to scream desperately for help.
Looking at Sarah today, it’s difficult to imagine that her accident was little more than a year ago. She has returned to work three days a week at Janus Henderson, who, she says, have been wonderfully supportive. I meet her in the company’s shiny glass office. She is dressed in white, wearing an immaculate tweed blazer. She has a new bionic arm equipped with AI technology, the first person in the world to have one. A prosthetic leg is concealed by loose trousers and trainers. We walk briskly along a corridor to a meeting room and she makes a frothy cappuccino, refusing my help.
Sarah was born in France to a Dutch mother and German father. She met her husband there in 2004 while they were studying. The couple moved to London nearly 20 years ago and married in 2009. Before her accident she used to enjoy painting and hiking. “Both hobbies I can’t easily do any more,” she says.
I remember the noise and the massive black wheels.
She points at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel, visible in the distance. “Every day at work I’d see helicopters from the London Air Ambulance arrive and depart from the helipad,” she says with a sad smile. “I never thought that one day it would be me they’d be helping.”
At 10.07pm a Tube driver on the opposite platform heard her cries and raised the alarm. The London Fire Brigade and the British Transport Police arrived, but it wasn’t until 10.39pm that a medical team could attend to her. A doctor from the London Air Ambulance was on the tracks holding her left hand, keeping her conscious. “I remember feeling a sudden icy coldness in my chest,” Sarah says. “And calmly telling the doctor that I think they needed to hurry up, because I felt like I was dying.” At 10.58pm she was placed on a stretcher on the tracks and pulled down the length of the train before being hoisted out.
She was taken to the Royal London Hospital and operated on immediately. Before the surgery she recalls signing a waiver authorising the hospital to remove her right arm. “I remember it being so strange that I had to sign with my left hand,” she says. She didn’t know that she would also lose her right leg below the knee until she came out of surgery. “I knew about the arm, but the leg was a bit of a surprise,” she says quietly. The following day she had another operation to allow her limbs to be fitted for prosthetics. Painkillers provided huge relief.
While she was fighting for her life, her husband, who works in finance, was asleep at their home. He had assumed his wife was working late at the office, as she often did. At 3am he was woken by his phone ringing. It was a nurse calling, who put Sarah on the phone.
“She told me, ‘I’ve been run over by a train,’ " Jeremy says. “I didn’t understand at first.” The nurse explained that Sarah had suffered a “life-changing traumatic accident” and he needed to come to the hospital as soon as possible. He called a neighbour to look after their daughters, who were asleep. He then had to wait 15 hours, until she was out of theatre and in recovery, to see her.
When he was finally allowed into the room at 6pm, he burst into tears. He saw his wife in a hospital bed, bruised and covered in cuts. “I was so happy to see she was alive,” Jeremy says. He was given only 15 minutes, then had to return home and tell their daughters what had happened. “That was probably the most difficult conversation,” he says. The next day he took the girls to visit their mum. “There was a lot of crying,” Sarah recalls.
She spent six weeks in the amputee rehabilitation unit at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital. Her immediate priority, she says, was “surviving, healing, learning how to walk again, get home — all of that before Christmas”. Her husband visited every day. Their daughters would also visit and help brush her hair and tie it up.
Sarah had to learn to walk with her new prosthetic leg and do daily physio to build up muscle. There were group activities and meals with other amputees. “I refused all of them,” she says. “I didn’t feel like an amputee. I only had one thing on my mind — to gain weight, gain muscle and get out of there.”
On December 1, 2022, almost two months to the day after the accident, Sarah returned home. When I spoke to her the following week she said she had tucked her daughters into bed and woken up next to Jeremy. “I cried tears of happiness. I had my cat come in and give me a cuddle, my kids jumping on the bed. It was just — wow. I cried every single day because everything was like I left it, but nothing was the same.”
Sarah’s year of recovery and readjustment has been miraculous. After a crowdfunding appeal set up by Jeremy exceeded its target of £250,000 (about NZ$511,000), she received her bionic AI arm in July. It is one of the most advanced prosthetics available. The socket that fits to her shoulder was made by Ottobock in Germany, her elbow by the US company Steeper and her hand by the Leeds-based company Covvi.
Sleek with slender fingers, it whirrs quietly in motion. Sixteen sensors inside the socket read muscle movement on her shoulder and turn it into electrical impulses sent to the arm, which moves accordingly. The inbuilt AI means it is starting to learn her mannerisms and predict her movements. Sarah controls it with her mind (a 10-second delay between thinking and acting is getting shorter) and fine-tunes movements using two apps on her phone. “If I want to pick up an egg, I can change the setting to ‘light touch’,” she says, moving her thumb and index fingers to a pinch.
She initially used a prosthetic leg provided by the NHS, but it didn’t fit properly. Her upper leg had changed shape in the six weeks she waited to receive the prosthetic. “It activated my sciatic nerve,” she says. “I was on the floor screaming. At one point I blacked out and fell on the floor from the pain.” The NHS offered to recast the leg, but it would take another six weeks. “I thought, I can’t spend another six weeks in bed or a wheelchair.” She went private, to the same clinic that had fitted her arm, and within three days had a new leg. “It cost £17,000 but it meant I could walk again,” she says.
Every day Sarah faces blisters and sores from the prosthetics. Her bed is on the second floor of her house and she can’t walk upstairs — either Jeremy carries her or she pushes herself up and down. She sought help from a trauma psychologist immediately after the accident and her daughters are also receiving therapy. “They have sustained PTSD,” she says. “This accident robbed them of their innocence and forced them to grow up and take care of their mother. They have accepted my robot limbs but they suffer when I suffer.” One of her biggest fears is that they will have to look after her physically and financially when she grows older, not just as an ageing parent but an amputee.
“I live in this weird world now where on the one hand I am fighting physical and mental battles every day that are so invisible,” she says. “Then, on the surface, I want it to seem like I’m back to normal.”
The only person who sees everything she is battling with is her husband. “He is the bedrock of everything,” she says, and it is the only time during our conversation that she cries. “He looks at me and still he sees me as a whole person. I look at myself and I find myself horrific. It’s such a horrible word, but the stumps — they look awful. And yet he looks at me and he loves me. I draw from that.”
She has questions for Transport for London (TfL) and her mission now is holding it to account for what she believes are failures that led to her life-changing injuries. She is campaigning for doors to be installed on platforms. Her local MP, Keir Starmer, has been helpful.
They alleged I was intoxicated, wore high heels — both wrong.
An investigation into Sarah’s fall concluded it was accidental. According to TfL, all procedures had been followed to the guidelines. “No one questioned whether those procedures are adequate,” she says. “Instead of them admitting liability they alleged I was intoxicated, wore high heels — both wrong.” TfL has not acknowledged any failure. Nick Dent, director of customer operations at London Underground, said: “Our thoughts continue to be with Sarah and her family. Safety is our top priority and we continue to take every possible measure to learn from any incident and put in place appropriate improvements.”
Sarah has seen some of the CCTV footage from High Barnet station. “It’s even more horrific than I thought,” she says. She believes that there were several moments when she could have been saved. “Why was there a gap so big that a grown woman could fall down? Why did nobody see me crawling around on the tracks on the CCTV?”
PTSD has stopped her from travelling on the Tube network. “My children are of an age where they’re starting to think about taking public transport by themselves and I am sick to my stomach every time they do,” she says. But the accident has changed her in other, more beneficial ways. “Having had this really close brush with death, it takes away some of your everyday fears.” She says she used to have bad vertigo, but since the accident it has gone.
“You can think, I could be a victim and stay at home. Or you can think, sod it, I’m just going to go out and do everything, because statistically nothing else should happen to me as well.”
This summer her daughters pleaded for the family to go on a camper van trip to France. “I told them, of course we can go but inside I was thinking, oh my God, how am I going to survive this?” she says. “My children loved it — they saw their mum walking on the beach, but they didn’t see that inside I was crying because I wanted to run and jump in the sea but I couldn’t. They saw their mum reading a book on the beach but they didn’t see that I was burning because I didn’t know that carbon fibre gets really hot in the sun.”
The family even went to Disneyland Paris. The heat, crowds and long distances made it an ordeal. “I hated all of it. But I saw the smile on the face of my children,” Sarah says. “Regardless of the pain, I did it all.”
Written by: Katie Gatens
© The Times of London
