to the head and she was dying in front of my eyes.
Which, as a father, you don't want to see.
I saw the people run,
and the way they were running,
and the way they were screaming,
It was this mass panic.
The atmosphere was really good. It was very lively.
Everyone was probably a similar age to me,
or maybe a bit younger, a bit older,
but very similar, all teens. It was great.
We'd made the decision that we were
going to leave the concert early.
So we were going to leave during the encore. As I came out,
I obviously went first and Eve was behind me.
We actually brushed shoulders with Salman, the terrorist.
We left straight after the encore
because we wanted to get out in time.
We didn't want to keep my mum waiting. We'd just walked,
I want to say five, six steps, into the foyer
before I pressed call, the bomb went off.
I was just hit with a force of, like, heat.
I remember I didn't know what it was,
but my instinct was to just curl up into a ball
and protect myself.
I remember I could feel myself being, like,
thrown up and down, like I was in the waves.
When the bomb went off, had we not been running,
we'd have been literally
right next to him, and we wouldn't be here.
I tried to stand up and look around to see
for my friend Amelia but it was quite, like,
I couldn't really see very well.
My vision was very blurry.
I remember looking down. That was the first thing
I looked at, was, like, my legs.
And I saw, like, holes and a bit of blood,
and then I touched my hands and I looked
at my hands and I thought, "Oh my God, what is this?"
I didn't want to worry her.
But I could tell she was really badly bleeding out.
She was losing a lot of blood really fast.
And she just kept saying to me,
like, "Millie, I'm going to die.
Millie, this is the time. I'm going to die."
And I remember seeing an arm
and the bottom of a leg.
And kind of looking down at me and checking both
my arms just to make sure that it wasn't me.
And thankfully I still had obviously everything
kind of was still attached.
And that's kind of when I knew, you know, something,
something serious had happened.
I saw the people run,
and the way they were running,
and the way they were screaming,
It was this mass panic.
One of my daughters was in my bedroom looking on my phone.
And when I enquired what she was doing.
She said, "Well, I just want to check if Martyn texted you
or tried to ring you because his mates keep messaging me.
They can't find him."
All I was bothered about as a dad
was making sure Eve stayed alive basically.
Obviously, I could see that she'd taken a bolt
to the head and she was dying in front of my eyes.
Which, as a father, you don't want to see.
Probably about 45 minutes after the attack happened,
I just had the strangest of feelings.
I just literally felt as if somebody got some
invisible scissors and cut something off.
I just felt suddenly he wasn't here anymore.
I needed to call Lucy's mum or my mum because
I thought, "What if there's other bombs at other exits?"
So I remember I kept saying to Lucy, like,
"What's your password for your phone? I can't unlock it."
Because my fingerprint ID wouldn't unlock it,
'cause I had a fingerprint ID on Lucy's phone.
And I couldn't understand why it wasn't working,
and when I looked down that's when I saw that,
like, three of my fingers were really badly injured
and hanging off. Like, I didn't think it was real.
I remember I could see inside the bones of my fingers
and I just, like, touched it. And I couldn't feel anything.
I was walking through the room.
Bodies and, like, a lot of rubble and stuff.
And I came across Sharon, who was laying there.
She was literally in a pool of blood. So I took off my belt,
and I wrapped it around her, just above the wound.
And I held it there in place.
So I thought, "Yeah, I'll stop that."
'Cause she was bleeding quite heavily and
I just wanted her to look up at the ceiling
because if she looked to her right,
there was the bomber's leg.
Which was just there alone.
It wasn't attached to his body.
I still remember the smell and almost like a smoky
type of atmosphere.
Very quiet, obviously there are screams,
there's people obviously dying and things like that.
But, you know, it's not like there was a lot going on,
because either people ran out, if they could, or it was
either you were dead, dying or, like me, seriously injured.
I started looking around more,
and I look at this young girl.
She was a very young girl, I could tell.
And she was just to the left of me. I'd say about
five metres to the left of me.
I'm trying to focus on Sharon,
and I can see her in the corner of my eye.
And I can see that she's screaming.
And she just, she wants her mum.
She was screaming for her mum.
And she was being attended to by
other members of staff.
They tried to stem her blood flow, with her injuries.
But, unfortunately, she didn't make it.
I think...
And that was just, like,
one of the main regrets of that night.
Wish I could have just somehow saved her.
The paramedics wanted to take me first, but I said, "Look,
I ain't going anywhere. You take my daughter. I'm not going
to make it. So stop wasting your time with me."
That's my last kind of sight.
That's when I go, "right. Done my job". And, yeah,
where the curtains come down.
And then I don't see anything then for a good two weeks.
I was told he died very, very quickly.
He died in a third of a second, which is very fast.
There was, I was told there was no room
for any active thought.
He was in a very, very good mood that evening.
He was very drunk and for once, as a mother,
I can say, I was really happy
that one of my children was very drunk that night.
I went straight to A&E and they assessed me.
And I went down straight away to theatre
for a 14-hour surgery.
Shrapnel injuries are caused by pieces of flying metal.
These injuries were nothing like I had ever seen before
in all my years working in an operating theatre.
And I think the only way you could have had experience
of that would have been working
in a major trauma centre or working in the military.
The experts said it was like being shot
at point-blank range 22 times.
So a bolt hit me in the side of the neck,
severed two arteries, should have gone straight through,
but it didn't. For some reason, I ended up swallowing it,
so they found it in my stomach.
So that was one. The second one hit me
in the centre of the back.
Totally severed my spinal cord.
I didn't realise straight away
that I'd be paralysed but, you know, they kind of said,
you know, you're not probably gonna walk again.
You're going to be in a wheelchair
for the rest of your life.
And yeah, gutted. Gutted.
We're not going to be defeated.
We're not going to be bowed by these extremists.
They want to divide us.
Greater Manchester is a place that believes
in standing together, and we will.
If you're going to try and divide people,
the worst place to do it is Manchester.
And I think we saw that, you know, the outpouring of love,
support, the way that, not just Manchester, the whole of
the UK, came together, and I felt that in my bed.
Look who it is No way
Way.
Hi, Martin. Hi, Eve.
It's David Beckham here.
I just want you to know that we're really thinking
about you at this difficult time.
I've heard how much you've been fighting
and how tough you've been.
I also hear that you're a mad Manchester United fan,
so I send my love. We're fighting with you and for you.
And I hope to get to meet you soon.
Lots of love. Bye-bye.
That's amazing
I didn't really speak to Lucy
until she woke up from her coma.
I remember that she messaged me. She Snapchatted me.
And she was just like, "Hi."
And I was like, "Oh my God."
Like, I screamed and I ran to my mum. I started crying and I
was like, "Mum, Lucy's awake.
She Snapchatted me." And then she went back
to sleep and didn't Snapchat me for two hours
and I thought she died again.
But, I still felt happy that she was finally
Snapchatting me and she was awake.
People thought, you know,
"It's happened now, it's two years on,
you should be alright by now."
My parents and my family members they said the same.
They said- the thing is they just didn't understand
how bad it was, and I just felt like
I didn't belong there anymore.
I just didn't belong on Earth anymore.
I think part of me died on that night.
Part of me, or if not all of me, died on that night.
But my physical self is still here, and I'm
somehow trying to pick up all the pieces and
put them back together.
The first two years after the bomb, I was very numb.
And I was, like, a very angry person,
who wasn't angry at the situation. I was angry at myself,
because I suffered a lot with survivor's guilt.
So I was just angry at myself for
not having worse injuries than Lucy,
not having worse injuries than the people who had died.
I thought, "Why haven't I died?"
When he had that rucksack on his back
and walked over that glass bridge into the foyer,
in his mind, he must have thought,
"I'm doing the right thing for my cause and I'm going
to die with it, for it."
But, you know, the problem is the real culprit
of all of this is not the people that are used
to carry out these heinous tasks.
It's the organisations, the ideology behind it,
that is really to blame.
They don't strap the bombs around themselves.
They send other people's children and sons and daughters
to carry out those tasks.
So that is why talking to young people
is so important to me.
Salman Abedi - he claimed to be a Muslim.
He claimed to be doing this as God's work.
Well, being a Muslim,
I felt like what I did on the night
was a symbol of what true Islam is.
I think Islam and the teachings that I was taught as a kid,
as a child, those are the core principles that allowed
me to actually make that first thought of going in there
and helping these people in the first place.
I know how lucky I am, and Eve is, to still be here,
because we shouldn't be here.
So she went to the Manchester Children's Hospital.
And she he was there for nine months.
So it was a long time.
And again, given her injuries,
you know, they didn't hold out much hope for her.
You know, very much like her daddy,
she's defied the experts. She's back at school now
full time. She goes to a different school.
She goes to a special needs school now.
So she's in a wheelchair.
She's going to need care probably for the rest of the life.
24-hour care.
Plenty of times where I said to myself, "You know what?
Let's just go and jump off a bridge and let's just end it.
I just can't take it anymore."
But there was just this voice saying to me that
"Usman, if you quit now, you're not gonna see what's
planned for you.
There's something so big in life,
you're gonna have to go get it, you just need to keep going.
Just keep going and it will be alright."
So I decided to forgive the guy who
did the attack at the arena and,
to me, forgiveness is really about freeing my soul
and enabling me to retain my own power.
Without that forgiveness, my head would have been filled
with anger and hatred, and that would have resulted
in me not functioning as a mother, wife or grandmother.
In September of this year,
I'm going to be climbing Kilimanjaro with
one of the nurses from Salford Royal that looked after me.
And one of the members of the public that ran in and helped.
I'm hoping to raise a million pounds for the
Spinal Injuries Association, for which I'm a trustee.
I don't think about the attackers anymore.
They're irrelevant to me.
I'm getting on with my life as much as I can.
I mean, I can't walk long distances.
But, like, I'm okay. I can do bits.
And I'm happy with that, considering what happened.
This year, I actually went to uni, with Lucy.
We both do the same course and we live in the same flat.
I think, you've got to think about the good things
that's come out of this situation.
Me and Lucy have been bonded for life now.
Like, we're always going to be friends.
We always know how each other feels.
We're always there for each other.
I can't bring him back, I couldn't save him
from what happened, but I can now do this for him
so that his death hasn't been for nothing.