A DAD says he’s lucky to be alive after a wooden window panel fell off a city centre building during heavy rain and missed his head by millimetres.

Craig Weston said the incident outside Kitsons Pharmacy, in Broad Street, has brought on his PTSD from a bicycle crash five months ago in which he fractured his neck.

The 49-year-old was collecting his Codeine prescription on Friday afternoon when a staff member slammed a first floor window above the pharmacy causing a piece of “jagged” wood around 20 inches to come crashing down, he said.

“It could have killed me. I don't bear to think what it could have done,” said Mr Weston, who lives with his wife and three children in Battenhall.

“I was fine afterwards, then I started to feel rough and I've started feeling giddy and weak and generally unwell – jittery and nervous.

“I just want it fixed ASAP. It's dangerous, I don't know whether the rain hit it.”

Previously, Mr Weston was cycling with his son in a child seat when he braked to avoid a cat and ended up flying headfirst over the handlebars in Sebright Avenue.

“I had a severe case of whiplash – I’ve gone headfirst into a parked car and really damaged my neck and various other injuries.”

The former construction worker, who has been unable to work since the cycling accident, was in hospital for a week and over the next few months “started having falls where I was blacking out”.

“It's to do with neurological symptoms from a head trauma. I started to get PTSD symptoms – I was crying a lot, or I was getting quite angry and I was feeling really scared and fearful and other times reckless.

“They told me a lot of rugby players get it from concussion,” he added.

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Prior to last week’s incident Mr Weston said he had been starting to recover thanks in part to physio sessions but the psychological shock of it has brought on his old physical injuries.

Over the weekend, he attended his son’s baptism while wearing a neck brace due to the pain.

“The brain does weird things. Traumatic experiences can regress you back. It’s taken me two or three months back in my recovery,” he said.

“I was doing well and coming out of it and becoming the old Craig.”

Mr Weston has praised the pharmacy staff who brought him back inside and gave him a cup of tea after the near miss.

“[They said]: ‘It’s an absolute miracle it didn’t hit you’. It came right past my ear.”

Mr Weston, seeing how hard it was raining, was going to dash down the passage alongside The Crown pub for cover when the window was slammed shut and the wooden came down.

He said, as a Christian, he believes everything “happens for a reason”.

“You always learn from something. [Death] is the most final situation in life. Not everything in life is nice and hunky dory.

“There’s no way that it should not have hit me. They were saying in the shop, ‘there’s an angel watching over you today’. That should have hit me straight on the head.”

A spokesman for Kitsons said: “It was a freak accident due to the weather and as a result we were concerned but it was resolved there and then. There was no injury. We have adjusted the window.”