Wells: He goes swimming in the icy water and is paralyzed – the wave breaks his neck

In unfortunate fashion, a man in Wales took a dip in icy waters on New Year's Eve to celebrate the fact that he was moving in with his partner.

Dan Richards, 35, and his partner Anna Thomas, 38, were ringing in the New Year by swimming in the chilly waters of Langland Bay, having moved in earlier that day. In fact, the couple from Swansea, Wales, had intended to visit family members after their afternoon swim to celebrate the time change together, but things didn't go as they expected.

“The plan was to go in and do a quick dive and then get out as fast as we could because it was so cold,” Richards told The New York Times, “which I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said we did that hundreds of times.” Sky News.

“Just the force of the wave that hit me and broke my neck and I was instantly paralyzed.”

So Richards waded into the water, and when he reached thigh-deep he fell into a wave, but it was stronger than it seemed when he described what happened.

“It spun me around, and instead of going up, it took me down and the back of my head hit the sand, continuing my forward momentum. “The force of the wave that hit me broke my neck and was instantly paralyzed,” he said characteristically.

Before calling for help, Richards recalls a “loud noise, very bright light.”

Then I opened my eyes under the water. She added: “I could see my limbs, but I had no control over them, so I held my breath.”

After his partner, her mother and a family friend carried him to safety, he was airlifted to a hospital in Bristol for further treatment.

“My world collapsed”

When the medical team confirmed that Richards was paralyzed from the neck down, Anna Thomas said her “world collapsed.”

“It was New Year's Eve and early, but I could hear people laughing and joking in the rooms next to mine, and I thought once they told me this news, how am I going to call his parents to tell them? And then my second thought was Haley, Dan's daughter.”

However, after this extremely difficult news, the support they have received has been “overwhelming”, the couple say.

“My family, Dan’s family, the support from strangers. There’s a guy in a suite upstairs who heard about our story and donated,” Thomas said.

“The kindness and generosity of people was something we didn't expect, something we didn't expect to happen. It was unbelievable,” Richards added.