Heather Mills - Accident and Amputees

Accident and Amputees

On 8 August 1993, Mills and Mincione walked to the corner of De Vere Gardens and Kensington Road, London, but while crossing Kensington Road Mills was knocked down by a police motorcycle (the last in a convoy of three), which was responding to an emergency call. Mills suffered crushed ribs, a punctured lung, and the loss of her left leg 6 inches below the knee; a metal plate was later attached to her pelvis. In October 1993, she had another operation which further shortened her leg. Mills was awarded £200,000 by the police authority as recompense for her injuries, even though the police motorcyclist, PC Osbourne, was later cleared by magistrates of driving without due care and attention. After the accident, Mills sold her story to the News of the World, and gave other interviews, saying she earned £180,000. She used the money to set up the Heather Mills Health Trust which delivers prosthetic limbs to people, particularly children, who have lost limbs after stepping on landmines. Mills often shows people her prosthetic leg; once taking it off during an interview on the American talk show Larry King Live, in 2002.

Mills booked herself into the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida, which put her on a raw food vegan diet, using wheat grass and garlic poultices to heal her wound. After an operation, Mills discovered that she had been previously identified as having an O rhesus negative blood type, when in fact she was A rhesus negative, which had interfered with her attempts to follow the so-called blood type diet. As her prosthetic leg had to be replaced on a regular basis (because the size of the amputated stump kept changing as it healed), she had the idea to collect thousands of discarded prosthetic limbs for amputees in Croatia. Mills persuaded the Brixton prison governor to get inmates to dismantle and pack the prosthetic limbs before being transported, which resulted in 22,000 amputees obtaining limbs in addition to the Croatian citizens who were already supplied with prosthetic limbs by the Croatian Institute for Health Insurance, which paid for the fitting of limbs and rehabilitation of patients. The first convoy of limbs arrived in Zagreb in October 1994 and Mills travelled with the convoy to film interviews with some of the recipients for the Good Morning with Anne and Nick daytime TV show. She received an award in 2001 from Croatia's prime minister for the money she raised to help clear that country of landmines.

With the help of ghostwriter Pamela Cockerill, Mills wrote a book about her experience titled Out on a Limb (1995), which was republished in America as A Single Step (2002). Extracts from Out on a Limb were serialised in The Daily Mail in March 2000. Mills handed all the proceeds from the book to Adopt-A-Minefield, and stated that it was one of "the few charities that 100% of their donations goes to clear minefields and survivor assistance". In 1995, Mills got engaged to British media executive Marcus Stapleton, after being together for only 16 days, and was then engaged to respected documentary filmmaker Chris Terrill in 1999, after only 12 days in Cambodia, where they were making a film about landmines. Mills ended their relationship five days before their planned wedding day, later telling friends in the media that she had called the wedding off because Terrill was gay, an MI6 agent, and that his mission was to undermine her anti-landmine work. Terrill had once told Mills that he had been interviewed by the intelligence services when he was thinking of a career with the Foreign Office, but later said, "I soon realised that Heather had a somewhat elastic relationship with the truth, which she was able to stretch impressively sometimes". Terrill also claims that although Mills said she was a vegetarian at the time, she often cooked her speciality dish, Lancashire hotpot, which contains lamb, for him; and her ex sister-in-law, Dianna Karmal, claims that Mills only became a vegetarian after meeting McCartney.

In 2003, the Open University awarded her an honorary doctorate for her philanthropic work on behalf of amputees. She continues to campaign, in addition to promoting the distribution of prostheses around the world and has been involved with the development of the Heather Mills McCartney Cosmesis, which gives amputees in America the chance to wear a Dorset Orthopaedic cosmesis, without having to travel to the UK. Mills is also vice-president of the Limbless Association. In 2004, she received a "Children in Need" award from the annual International Charity Gala in Düsseldorf and in the same year, the University of California, Irvine, gave her their 2004 Human Security Award and created the Heather Mills McCartney Fellowship in Human Security to support graduate students conducting research on pressing human security issues. She is a former Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Association Adopt-A-Minefield programme.