Two years ago I survived a road traffic accident. It was one of those life-changing events which arrive from nowhere, then proceed to re-draw the map of your life. I write this not for sympathy, at least not for this particular mishap; but if you do have some sympathy, please keep it stored carefully somewhere cool and dry in an airtight receptacle, just like the label says. You never know when you might need it, or for whom.
I started writing this to describe how I ended up on painkillers for months, how that affected me, how I worked out what that did to me, and how I recovered; but in the writing I realised that telling this story would make very little sense if I didn’t include a prequel. So here it is.
Before
It was the only major car crash I’ve been involved in, and the aftermath took time to reveal itself. Despite walking away relatively unscathed physically from a wreck which could have ended my days, for months the recovery was something I understood only in abstract. If this survival process wasn’t hiding in plain sight, which it often did, it lurked in corners pretending it wasn’t there, manifested in unpredictable behavioural changes, and ambushed me with the sudden arrival of physical pain.
In retrospect, for months, almost a year, my life became a flickering, long forgotten, dark but unfunny and rather naff comedy film which had somehow bypassed my finely-tuned reality filters. My naïve attempt to outrun the cascade of misfortune which followed the crash became a futile attempt to control an unstoppable, relentless tsunami of events; until eventually the extent of the impact showed its face, at which point I was able to see what had actually happened, and navigate life once again.
Early September, Somerset was warm and golden. I was on my way home from working three days at a really nice school in Dorset where I taught from time to time as a supply teacher. I wasn’t tired, and I was driving safely under the speed limit when I was hit by an oncoming truck. I don’t have any memory of the actual moment of collision. I just knew that there had been a loud bang, there was white smoke all around me, and the car was stationary. My first thought was that the car was about to catch fire and explode. It took me several seconds to realise that the ‘smoke’ was caused by the airbags which had all burst open. I was deafened somewhat, my ears were ringing loudly. I knew where I was geographically more or less, but I was in the middle of the road facing the the way I had come. I remember thinking “How the fuck have I got here?” The adrenaline started to do its work, the imperative kicked in - GET OUT NOW. The driver side door wouldn’t open, it was jammed, crammed, half ripped off. I moved over to the passenger side and pushed open the door. I stood up, got away from the car. My right knee hurt quite a bit, but I could walk. This was a plus. I saw that the car was a wreck, and that I had spun around. I turned around and saw a 7 tonne sewage truck with a ridiculous number plate punning on shit. It had some minor scrape marks on the driver’s side, it would need a paint job. Strangely, I was aware of my thinking being mostly analytical. A big, red-faced driver appeared in my face and started to tell me it was all my fault. I didn’t say a word, just looked at him, looked into his eyes and despite his slight belligerence, I saw his fear. He was protecting himself. I knew these things like reading a factual book, although the magnitude of the event was sinking in without effort.
Aside from my knees hurting I was remarkably unscathed. I was alive. Counter to the cliché, this thought didn’t bring me relief. A woman came up to see if I needed help. She seemed concerned, or perhaps just wanted to get home. Both. I didn’t know. I asked her what she saw, she said “you were both quite high on the road” which meant, in the middle of it, not stoned. Or pissed. The truck driver had a drinker’s ruddy complexion. I forced myself not to say that. I was sober as a judge, m’lud. I was though. Comedy now made sporadic notes in my brain. Great timing, I thought, to couch it all in rubbish jokes. But she had given me something - maybe the cause was 50-50. The nice lady gave me something else. I had the presence of mind to get my phone out and take the helpful woman’s name and number down. She would have seen the crash better than anyone.
I still couldn’t work it out. I sat down on the roadside grass. It was unlike me, I wasn’t tired, I didn’t even have the radio on, so I wasn’t distracted by anything I could remember, but whatever, I had no recollection of the actual collision. One minute I was driving home, the next minute I wasn’t. I was alive, but my mum’s 20 year old Toshiba was a goner. Except it was a Toyota, I corrected myself. It was a car, not a laptop. I forced myself not to check that this was true.
I remember thinking about self-preservation and wondering what that meant. Anything less robust than a solid Toyota steel-construction and I could have been disabled, or dead. It had survived Mum’s regularly erratic driving, but not my careful version, apparently.
The Police came, took pictures, asked questions. They spent a long time with the truck driver. It looked like they knew him, very pally. I was a London lad, they were locals. They took statements at the roadside, and after about an hour a truck came and dragged mum’s wrecked car to the side of the road, freeing the afternoon traffic which now extended a mile or more in both directions. Later I realised that they should have got me to hospital, but they didn’t. They failed to check if I had any pain or physical damage (some), if I could hear (not very well actually), if I could see, whatever. I think I was breathalysed. Actually the mental surface was functional, the rest was spaghetti hoops. I was upright, answering questions, that would do them.
After the roadside questioning, before I left the scene I worked out that just before the collision the truck was been being chased by three motorbikes. I had a proper memory of that, and I still have that memory, in fact, it’s the only one I have apart from the post-crash scene, leaving school, some roads in between, and what I have written here. Scraps of memory only. I remember deciding not to have the radio on. The bikers were right up his arse though, and I recalled thinking I’d have to avoid them if they overtook him. Now, the motorbikes were all parked up, frozen in a jam with the other vehicles. The young lads were having a smoke, waiting to get on their way.
I could have been concerned by the suspicion that I was being made responsible for this chaos, but I was more concerned, whether that was true or not, that I had lost memory, aside from tiny puzzle pieces. I knew I was in shock, but that didn’t help. I wondered if it would ever return.
I don’t know how long I was there, maybe an hour or two. My friend Chris came to get me. What a kind man. As he drove me home, I thought only that I was alive, and how undramatic that was. I sometimes thought in Before Crash Time, but it was like remembering a language I had once learnt but no longer used. My life was now apportioned into Before and After Crash, I remember thinking, without any feeling about it. Despite functioning, my brain was numb as a dead leg. My knees hurt a bit. My ears were ringing, I was quite deaf. Good old adrenaline.
After such an event, you are in shock. Then, the aftershock. Then, although you might be superficially coping, you get more shock as it sinks in that the shit has hit the fan and your options are quite different now. I call this the shit shock, mostly because I like alliteration, but also because I was hit by a life-changing sewage truck. But because Shit Shock™️ hadn’t really hit me yet, I tried to keep working.
I was doing OK in South West England, I liked living there with the sweet and affectionate cat, in an historic town, on a hill, behind a church; but with no car, working in schools dotted over three counties was seemingly now impossible, gone.
Never say die, they say, and I heard them, despite the deafness; and so, as valiant and determined to survive the iceberg as a Titanic sailor, I tried cycling to the nearest schools. The first morning, a week after the accident, I ventured out just after dawn into South West wet weather. Fifteen minutes later, a truck forced me off the road and through a hedge.
This was worse than the Before and After Crash. Soaked to the bone and rattled to my core I pushed my twisted bike home. I called the education agency, said sorry to them, not just because I needed the work and now couldn’t trust the income which had sustained me for four years, and not that I was scared shitless by this second narrow escape, but ashamed that now they couldn’t rely on me. God knows why I interpreted this as a personal weakness, but I eventually I understood that depression frequently ruins self-esteem. Of course I was depressed, I was on my own, swift solutions not abounding. I was also still deep in shock, on auto-pilot, survival mode. What did I expect? Miracles? Anything to say about this, God?
The second attempt was a long-ish run, 20 miles or more to Wedmore. A kind friend gave me enough to buy a speedy e-bike which, it turned out, didn’t work. That was the day I got stuck in the middle of nowhere (also a metaphor for my condition) which unknown to me happened to be the most dangerous road in Somerset. I took the bike back to the shop, and gave up on this two-wheeled commuting option. If I didn’t, I began to think, it would kill me where Shit-Truck had failed. I switched off the “just soldier on” madness and racked my battered brain for a better solution.
Funds were dwindling. I got a co-tenant, who turned out to be hugely unstable. I didn’t notice until she wouldn’t let me in my own kitchen, and boasted about having pleasured herself when I was out. I wasn’t offended or disgusted by this ‘over sharing’, but she clearly had mental health issues. How could I have missed these crystal-clear tell-tale signs? It turned out that I was the same as everyone else, easily duped. I feared for myself and the cat. The black and white film character which was never far away begged my pardon, and I cried both with laughter and with grief, aghast at my rudderless optimism.
Slowly, in massive denial about everything possible but unaware of it, I allowed the universe to explain that I really wasn’t ready yet, psychologically or physically, to be on the road, and if I could get to a school, I might possibly find my teaching skills somewhat diminished. In fact it was far worse than that, but I couldn’t see it. I was in several pieces, but my stubborn refusal to accept this, and trying to act like a super stupid hero was making everything worse. I got some video production work miles away which required multiple bus journeys. Buses in the South West are generally unreliable, expensive and massively slow, running random times a week, with fares many times the price they should be. It was awful. I could do the work, just not the travel. I accepted defeat and started looking for a place in a city. Three months later, I found one - the Great Wen, aka London.
London was crowded and busy, but at least it had lots of jobs, and it had buses that didn’t cost an arm and a leg which ran several times a day.* Also it helped that I knew the shortcuts to get places. I was however starting to hurt. My brain hurt, my body hurt. My sentences were indefinite, my days and nights underlined by dread. My sleep was all over the place.
I was allergic to loud noises even though I was still slightly deaf, and while I had zero recollection of The Actual Bang, my limbic system was looking after it for me. On London double deckers in London traffic you get many loud noises happening at random. When such a noise happened, if I didn’t like the sound of it I would react spontaneously, calmly getting off the bus at the very next stop. This was often foolish, as mostly I wasn’t anywhere near my destination. I was aware that I was being triggered, and knew I would have to remedy this. Then I got on another bus, and… off we go again.
Earplugs helped, but this was just one of many such behavioural quirks which surfaced as Autumn turned to Winter. Another was tears. Not that I worried about showing emotions, but the regular emission of tears was unpredictable in the extreme, and so frequent I sometimes became dehydrated, and couldn’t work out why. Triggers for lachrymosity could be sad, happy, or unfortunate news; they could be nostalgia for past losses, gone and never to return, or wistful longing for better futures, never to appear. It could be being let down, or my letting someone down.
Music of all kinds, art, the offer of company, or just the existence of any of these three could render me useless, anti-social, and utterly overwhelmed. Finally, the physical pain started to make itself known, and I admitted to being vulnerable. That word saved me - honest, but adult. I could say that without wincing.
Three months later I registered at a medical centre and explained I was new in town and was suffering from being side-swiped by a 7 tonne truck some months previously. Yes, the nice doctors agreed, I was suffering. They were right.
You’re screwed! they didn’t say, and you’ve just started to notice how much. Jolly good!
We don’t even know how you’re standing! they exclaimed with a jocular smile. I didn’t smile.
You even make sense sometimes. “Thanks” I thought ironically, grateful for a miniscule mercy.
Are you sure you’re not totally OK? “Of course I fucking am. I showed up, didn’t I?” I didn’t reply.
We can’t help you but the psychologists can. Let’s get them to do some triage. Over the phone. Meanwhile, and with an invisible wink the doctor said, do you want some pills to help you cope?
So it began. Finally, NSAID said hello.
*It’s called a ‘run-on joke’
What a story Dean, I had no idea you had been in this situation.
Horrific. But a fabulous piece of writing.