Grace Spence Green doesn’t remember the moment of her accident, when a man leapt from a third-floor balcony in Westfield shopping centre, in east London, and landed on top of her. She was a medical student and just 22, and only recalls walking along the shopping centre atrium towards the train station.

The next thing she knew was waking up on the floor and not being able to feel her legs. “I remember crying, maybe screaming.” The collision had broken her spine, leaving her paralysed from the chest down. Shockingly, abruptly, the trainee doctor had become a patient.

In her powerful new book To Exist As I Am, Grace, now 29, tells the story of her traumatic experience, and her physical and mental recovery. A woman of extraordinary resilience, determination and positivity, she says she wouldn’t change what happened to her. "As the years went by, what I gained through my disability, how it’s changed me, the relationships that have changed – I can now say I wouldn’t change it because of all I’ve gained from it,” she says.

She spent two weeks in hospital where titanium was bolted into her spine to hold her shattered vertebrae in place. She spent much of that first week “floating on a cloud” of morphine, while her parents and her partner of three years, Nathan, spent every possible moment by her bedside. But Grace, who had enjoyed a happy, loving and comfortable upbringing in London, “felt as though I just slipped out of my life”.