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Hamster wife tells of hospital desperation

18/09/2007

The wife of Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond has spoken of the "soul-destroying" ordeal she spent at her husband's bedside in hospital.

Mindy Hammond reveals that she shared the hospital bed with her husband as he recovered from the 288mph crash at Elvington Airfield on September 20th last year.

In an extract from Hammond's autobiography On The Edge, published in the Daily Mirror today, Mindy reveals how "every minute at Richard's bedside was an eternity".

She describes how she had to break the news of the crash, which left Hammond's doctors initially fearing for her husband's life, to her two daughters and how as he slowly recovered "we fell in love all over again".

"He was childlike and forgetful and difficult but he was undeniably Richard, and I think I probably loved him more then than I'd ever imagined possible," she wrote.

"My Richard remembered me, remembered our love, and came back running, as though embracing a lost emotion he'd been seeking for too long."

Hammond was rushed to hospital at Leeds General Infirmary where surgeons saved his life by relieving the enormous pressure building up on his brain with a handheld drill.

He was then transferred to a Bupa hospital in Bristol by Yorkshire air ambulance service, which had airlifted him to hospital immediately after the accident.

The incident has been in the headlines recently with the publication of the BBC's report into the accident's cause. It concluded that a "penetrating object such as a nail" had damaged one of the vehicle's front tyres.