Loose Women star Sophie Morgan has opened up about how a life-changing car crash as a teenager has impacted her life.
The award-winning disability advocate, 37, has compared the "two different lives" she had led, as both a disabled and non-disabled person, and confessed she doesn't live her life "with regret or remorse".
Sophie was just 18 and a "very inexperienced" driver when she was involved in a car crash that left her instantly paralysed from the chest down in 2003.
The star was hospitalised and rehabilitated for about three months and now uses a wheelchair as a result of a spinal injury.
Reflecting on what it's like to "wake up with a different body" following a life-changing accident, Sophie explained how it can feel like she has lived two different lives.
"Non-disabled and disabled are very different experiences," she began telling OK! magazine.
"It does feel like two different lives. The person I became after my injury is very different to the person I was. I’ve grown up, obviously, as I was a kid, but those two realities, personalities, identities definitely feel very split."
Earlier this year, Sophie shared a series of snaps of herself as a teenager, taken the day before she was paralysed in the in the collision.
Asked whether she would go back in time and warn herself not to get behind the wheel that day, the presenter admitted the answer to that question is not straight forward.
"Anyone who has had trauma in their lives that hasn’t killed them but has made them stronger can relate, I think. You don’t know if you would go back and change the course of events, because if you did then you wouldn’t be where you are," she explained to the publication.
"It’s not as clear-cut. I don’t live with regret or remorse. Of course, there is the conundrum of disability being hard and spinal injury is not an easy thing, so there’s certainly a compulsion to be my other self.
"But then I wouldn’t have gained all the things I have, so it’s a paradox."
Following the accident, Sophie didn't let her injuries hold her back - travelling to Canada less than a year after her crash and joining her family on the ski slopes on a snowmobile.
The very same year, the presenter went on to take part in the first BBC series of Beyond Boundaries, in which she joined 10 people with disabilities on a 220-mile expedition across Nicaragua.
When quizzed by OK! magazine about if she was ever worried about getting in a car again, Sophie admitted: "I didn’t carry any fear after the crash. I wanted the feeling of freedom that those sorts of vehicles can give me, so I very quickly got back into a car."
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