Am I the same person?

Sheena McDonald was knocked down by a police car on an Islington street five years ago and was left in a coma, with massive head injuries. When she began the long, exhausting process of recovery, the battery of neurologists, psychologists and surgeons who scanned, tested and pieced her back together did not offer any kind of longterm prognosis.

To her parents and her partner, BBC correspondent Allan Little, they said almost nothing.

When, after four days, McDonald gradually began to regain consciousness, she was suffering from almost total memory loss, was only able to speak nonsense, and was in no condition to understand what was happening to her. So it came as a spinetingling shock, five years on, to hear what the doctors really thought of her chances back then. "They thought I'd be able to look after myself eventually - I'd be able to tie my own shoelaces - and perhaps go back to part-time work," she says. "You know, shelfstacking. Which is a gentle code for saying 'just forget it'."

Instead, of course, here she is, drinking fruit tea at the Bafta café on Piccadilly and talking about the BBC documentary she has made, to be shown next week, on the subject of her remarkable recovery. The irony is, had she not been well enough to return to various hospitals to interview her doctors, she would never have known how limited their prognosis had been.

In the flesh, at 48, McDonald looks very much like the person she was before the accident. There are few visible scars. On the middle finger of her left hand she wears an ornate silver ring set with a gorgeous olive-coloured gem - bought, she says, to hide the permanent crook in her finger that gives her hand a slightly clawed shape. If she lifts her long fringe, you can see her "crumpled horn" on the left side of her head, a patch of skin and bone that surgeons had to "put back together like a jigsaw". She will always have a titanium staple in her face below the left eye and two titanium pins in that middle finger.

What you can't see, of course, are the changes to her personality, memory and identity. "And that's the big question," she says. "For a while I lost myself. So where did I go? Am I actually the same person I was?"

Before the accident, McDonald, who grew up in Edinburgh (her father, the Rt Rev Dr Bill McDonald, now retired, was former Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland), was on national radio or TV almost every night - immaculately made-up, well dressed, unapologetically intellectual - presenting Channel 4 News, introducing opera from Glyndebourne, hosting discussions for the BBC on high politics and high arts. Her career left her no time for the conventions of marriage or for children.

"Sometimes I have to look at my old diaries to remember exactly what I was
doing," she says, "and every half hour is filled with something: meetings, programmes, theatre, lunches. I didn't take a holiday for years." There was both a warmth and a steeliness about McDonald's presenting style, a skilful combination that could sucker politicians and charm audiences. In the mid- to late Nineties she was undoubtedly the most successful female presenter on TV.

All of that changed in the blink of an eye late at night on 26 February 1999. Attempting to cross rain-slicked, trafficpacked St John Street in Islington on her way home after a party in town, McDonald was hit by a police van driving on the wrong side of the road. She doesn't remember a thing about this.

A long time later, she brought a civil action against the police for negligent driving, and the Met eventually settled out of court. "This isn't America and you can't pay off mortgages with this kind of action," is all she'll say now, "but it wasn't the amount that mattered, really. The police have never said anything at all to me, but I found implicit in their decision to settle an admission of at least a degree of culpability."

I asked her if she still feels anger towards Glenn Whiteley, the police officer who was driving, but you sense this is a chapter McDonald is trying very hard to close. "Look, I'm sorry," she says, "I just don't want to go there again. Can we just not talk about the police?"

In the intensive-care unit at University College Hospital, McDonald was put on a ventilator and pinioned with wires. Her younger brother, Rod, has since told her that her head swelled to the size and colour of a "blue pumpkin with a hole in it", and her eye "was somewhere in the middle of my face, not where it was supposed to be". The left side of her head - where, it's thought, the van's wing mirror hit her with tremendous force - was a mess of tissue and bone.

Allan Little, then based in Moscow, flew back to London the day after the accident, terrified by what he would find. For a while it was touch and go, and for a longer while, he and McDonald's family were forced to contemplate the possibility of paralysis or critical brain damage.

When McDonald began to emerge from the coma, her limbs "thrashed about" as her brain reconnected with her arms and legs. For weeks she existed in "a sort of in-between state between consciousness and unconsciousness", babbling in what Little calls "dream-talk", her sentences perfectly constructed but making no sense. Her short-term memory was shot to pieces (for five weeks she suffered post-traumatic amnesia and was unable to remember events hour-by-hour), while her recollection of the 15 years before the accident was at first non-existent and later elliptical.

McDonald describes Little's care and determination in the months and even years that followed as absolutely crucial to her recovery. At the time of the accident, they had been a couple for five-and-a-half years, yet - with McDonald based in London and Little all over the world - they had never lived together, and led quite separate, independent lives.

"You just can't underestimate what he did. An awful lot of people who suffer the kind of injury I did aren't able to work again. Their relationships break down, they have to sell their house, their lives fall apart. As well as holding down a full-time job, Allan gave me the kind of intensive, stimulating, long-term care that makes all the difference to a recovery."

Little played hundreds of games of Scrabble to improve her word skills; he talked to her endlessly, and indeed lived with her when she was "incredibly difficult to be with: badtempered, selfish, entirely focused on me".

"For a while there was this ghastly possessed she-devil sharing his life," she says. "I'm amazed that he didn't just stay in Moscow."

McDonald got fat, too. The part of her brain that controlled her appetite was, and still is, damaged by the van's impact, and she simply didn't know when to stop eating. Of all the grim consequences of the accident, surely this was the least harsh. But no, replies McDonald, "because what you look like is a part of your identity" and at a time when she was struggling to relocate that identity, not looking like the old Sheena was tough in itself.

"Allan kept saying to me, you're eating too much! But I just couldn't help it. I was vast, enormous. I couldn't follow any eating regime because I had no control at all over my appetite. Eventually, another part of my brain took over and now I've finally lost weight."

There is a designer dress she has kept since her opera-presenting days, a tight, golden number that she's determined to get back into.

Nowadays, the ambition that pushed McDonald to the top has faded into the background, crowded out by "family and friends, the old cliché". "As you get older I think you become more aware of vulnerability. Before the accident, I was already beginning to understand it. One of my best friends had breast cancer and another had gone through a divorce, and this is going to sound completely odd, but I thought my personal trauma was when my flat
suffered a colossal flood and the ceiling fell down. But of course it wasn't."

McDonald is still "on the bench" for The World Tonight; she still lectures and hosts discussions; she still makes documentaries - but she no longer lives for work.

"For months and months I couldn't do anything at all, of course. And for the next three-and-a-half years I was chronically fatigued."

She also suffered a brief period of depression, a classic consequence of serious head injury. "But there's more to it than that," she insists. "You realise how precious life is, certainly, and that makes you a more optimistic person, with different priorities. Waking up in the morning is fantastic. Surviving every day is great. If no one ever hired me for a job again I could fill my days reading and writing, visiting art galleries. Allan became irritated for a while because, having been an intolerant, possessive person, I suddenly turned into Pollyanna."

Unless Little is on the TV, reporting from Paris, where he's now based, McDonald doesn't watch the news any more. "I'm not very keen on seeing all the bad news. I'd much rather listen to it on the radio or read the newspapers."

Doctors have described McDonald's recovery as "a miracle". Her vocabulary nowadays is seemingly limitless and her bookshelves are full of medical journals and papers on neuroscience. In the BBC documentary, scientist and operadirector Dr Jonathan Miller says that her recovery is all down to luck; that, in other words, damage to McDonald's brain half an inch in a different direction might have left her without speech or unable to walk.

But McDonald herself isn't convinced. "Science can chart some functions and attach them to parts of the brain, but things like memory and identity, well, no one really knows where they reside, or where they go when you lose them." She remains fascinated by the fact that her memory of political events - "Nigerian politics! The EU!" - returned more quickly than the recollection of friendships and family.

And so is she the same person, when medical opinion insists she can't be?

"My feeling is that medical opinion is conservative in its expectations. I don't think I've made a freakish recovery, but I also don't want to offer false hope to others. I think my experience might expand those medical expectations. I feel like the same person, but I'm not sure that I can know that I am."

Storyville - Who Am I Now? is on Tuesday, 20 January , on BBC4 at 9pm.