“It will never be me.”

Like most keen skiers, this is what I have silently told myself, with fingers metaphorically crossed, whenever I have seen another skier or snowboarder, battered and bloodied, being ferried from the slopes on a “blood-wagon” – a low sled covered in orange tarpaulin serving as a stretcher for the mountains’ wounded.

More than any cold at altitude, the sight sends a shiver down the spine.

Perhaps I even thought of this vain hope as I tumbled head over heels, out of control, a cart-wheeling mass of arms, legs, poles and skis, down the steep end of a ski run in Switzerland’s fashionable St Moritz at the start of February.

My mind was elsewhere as the end of one ski wedged itself brutally into the packed snow, my right leg still attached, wrenching my knee viciously as I continued to fall down the mountainside.

By the time I came to a stop, it took mere seconds to realise that I was about the join the legions of the badly injured and have humiliatingly, be rescued by the ski patrol and stretchered off. My right leg, skewed at an unnatural angle, refused to move, rewarding any attempt to make it budge with an agonizing jolt of pain. It was shattered.

Even as a group of very kind Italian skiers fetched help, as my leg was wrapped in a cushion of inflatable bubble-wrap, and I was gingerly lifted onto my own blood-wagon, the hope remained - it can’t be that serious, surely. It lingered on as I lay on the snow waiting for the transport, as an ambulanceman I injected me with painkillers, and as I fished out my mobile to gently break the news to my girlfriend - sipping coffee at the top of the mountain.

Yet, with a cruel inevitability, hope mutated instantly to fear as a crusty but clearly expert surgeon peered at my X-rays.

The words are ingrained: “It’s a terrible fracture,” he told me. “We must operate immediately.” I cringed inwardly at the news that the top of my tibia - the right lower leg - was in about 20 fragments, and my right anterior cruciate ligament - which controls the flexing of the knee was … well was no more. Apparently I had also “exploded” the cartilage of my right knee.

As I struggled to absorb all of this, several hours of further X-rays and MRI scans followed, then and epidural anaesthetic and three hours of surgery to piece together my bones with a scary-looking titanium plate, pins and screws.

The ligament was recreated with a plastic prosthetic. Then days of rest mingled with shock and disbelief, the removal of drains and catheters and eventually the start of physiotherapy, and hobbling pathetically on crutches. Painkillers were welcome.

But I was in good and expert hands. Four weeks later and my NHS doctors at home told me how they were “marveling” at the repair job on my leg and knee. The surgeon responsible had himself saved some extra X-rays of what he described as “an interesting case”. The plate, he suggested, should perhaps be surgically removed in a year or two. I’d have preferred not to be such a good case study.

Ahead lies a long haul of physiotherapy and slow but (hopefully) steady recovery. Behind, the shock of the accident, the stress of arranging repatriation - eased by excellent help from British Airways, I was relieved to find - and (a warning to others, a nightmarish battle with my insurers to get them to pay the £10,000 bill for my treatment).

I’d been lucky for ten years of wonderful skiing - but no-one can know when they will find themselves laying helplessly on a blood-wagon, staring at the mountains above, and wondering just what the hell they thought they were doing.