I bought the Legendary Edition yesterday, great game. However I currently only have one save file and it brings me straight into a moment where I'm killed by a hoarde of Falmer. There's no time to pause and eat/drink, shout, etc. Is there any way to resolve this without starting over and losing a day+ of progress?

Thanks!

Always have more than one Save file.
And turn on Auto-Save, so that you can have three different recent auto-saves files to pick from, along with a few hard save files that you make manually.

So I'm SOL then. Good to know now I guess, the sooner I can restart the better!

Just keep trying. i had this issue at times but im on PC, so i can easily enable god mode in the console.