I had just enough time to get through the first 2 letters of a particular 4 letter word in my head before I collided with the front of the car. Later, the damage to the car bonnet would show I had only been able to change my course by a few degrees before impact. By then it was already too late; the fractured neck, the spinal surgery, the next 15 months of hospital stay and rehab, the redirection of the rest of my life was already a done deal, I just didn’t know it yet. The driver would later say that he had stopped at the give way and looked but had not seen me. The crash report and subsequent reconstruction showed the front light of my bike would have been visible from 200m away.

The sensation I vividly remember I can only describe as crunchy, and that word definitely doesn’t do it justice. I suppose, looking back, it was the feeling of the caveman that lives in my brainstem waking up, panicking, taking over and dumping the whole payload of 11 KFC secret herbs and spices that are reserved for such situations straight into my bloodstream. My hands were trying to squeeze the brakes harder than anything I’d squeezed before. In reality there was not enough time for them to squeeze anything before I was launched forwards and the bike was ripped out my hands, but the sensation of squeezing hard enough that it felt like my tendons would part company with the bones of my hands was something that would revisit me unbidden in my sleep. They were strange, violent dreams and would wake me up with a vivid clenching in my hands but when I looked, they were sat dead and lifeless beside me. When first recalling the incident I really believed I’d held onto the bike for longer-but it was out of my hands, just like everything else.

I knew I was rotating because I saw the car, then the sky, then the ground, then the sky. Then just the sky. That was it; the damage was already done. It all happened so fast.

It was like God himself slapped me on the back: a sudden force that was so immense that it was alien. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it all disappeared; like dropping a boulder into a lake with no ripples, or a clap in a soundproofed room. No pain. No nothing. At this point I didn’t know what the fuck was going on, but I really needed to get up and assess the situation. The caveman demanded it. Oh God. I lifted my head up, bringing my chin towards my chest to see the rear lights of a car a few metres away. I had cleared the car. I couldn’t get up. What? I looked to the left and could make out a blurred black tube disappearing into the darkness. I had lost my glasses. The tube was inexplicably connected to the shoulder of my coat, but there was absolutely no way that was my arm. I could feel my arms, and I couldn’t feel whatever the hell this thing was. I gave it a wiggle. Nothing. Oh God. I couldn’t feel my arms.

I had been injured before. Playing basketball sometimes I would roll my ankle and know in that instance, in a bizarre moment of clarity almost immediately after the pain, that it might be six weeks before I would be back to how I was in the seconds before. When I really think about how I felt in that moment after hitting the road neck first I realise that I had a similar eerie placid clarity in my mind, and I think I knew on some level that something of life changing magnitude had happened to me, that there would be no six weeks, or six months, or six years. It didn’t dawn on me, because you expect the dawn, the dawn follows the night and the dawn comes on slowly. It wasn’t the slow drawing of curtains at the end of the show to applause, the smooth ending at the right time; it was a bomb and ground zero was my relationship with reality, my sense of self.

I took a deep breath and felt a horrific, disgusting dragging sensation in my abdomen. Something was not right. I took another. The same thing, like a hand with reaching up from my gut into my thorax, grabbing a big handful of whatever it could find and unceremoniously drawing it downwards. God damn it was cold. When did it get so cold? Where are my glasses? The dragging was my diaphragm. It probably only took me a few seconds to work it out; my chest muscles were paralysed and all I had left to breathe with was my diaphragm. From there it didn’t take much time to work out my spinal-cord was definitely not fine.

I became aware of car doors opening and closing and that someone, presumably the driver of the car, was in my periphery pacing back-and-forth saying something like “oh my God,” repeatedly to himself. He never came close to me and I don’t remember ever seeing his face.

I now knew to keep my head and neck very still to prevent any further damage. I just looked at the night sky.

“I’m a doctor.” A woman’s face appeared upside down above me. It was slightly blurry.

“Yeah, me too.” I said.

It must’ve been weeks later that I put together the pieces of my memory properly and realised that I knew this person, that we had been in medical school together and she had been driving in the car behind the one that hit me. I can’t remember if I recognised her at the time. I doubt it.

When writing this down I have been struck by the strange idea that on the one hand this is just a story, a sequence of steps, something that doesn’t need any feelings or philosophy attached to it, and on the other hand it’s an event that completely redefined me as a person, changing the trajectory of my life so drastically that the old me really died in the road that evening. I didn’t really get to say goodbye to the person I used to be: he went for a bike ride and didn’t come home. In the months and years that followed I had to start again so many times with so many things, working out what was the old me what was the new me; what I was allowed to keep and what I had to throw away. There was a lot throwing away. For at least a year every day I thought about the collision, knowing that a few degrees less rotation over that car and I land legs first, probably break them both and a year later you might not even know it had even happened. Equally a few degrees more and I land headfirst and paste my brains in a grey matter pâté smear on the asphalt. For that year I wished for a few more degrees rather than the amount I got.

Someone was asking me for my phone. I said it was in my inside coat pocket. I could see someone rummaging around my chest but I couldn’t feel it. I told them to call my girlfriend. From this point on my memory starts to get hazier, but I told her there been an accident, that I couldn’t move my arms or legs, that it must be my spinal cord. At first, she thought I was joking. That was the beginning of a whole other story running tangentially to this one, where she had to call my parents, my friends, make the phone calls nobody wants to make and everyone hopes they will never hear. She got her housemates, also doctors, who only lived two minutes away to come and find me. I think they came with me in the ambulance but honestly, I can’t remember. Around the same time an orthopaedic surgeon walking his dog happens to arrive, which tells you all you need to know about the area I lived in; I had half the staff of QMC emerging from the bushes to say hello or tripping over me while popping out for some milk. It was also around this time that, presumably from being in shock, I became really concerned about where my glasses were. They were really new, quite expensive, and no longer on my face. My subconscious must have considered this situation one that I really should be experiencing in HD, because I think I kept asking people where they were.

As more people arrived, a pain was growing rapidly between the top of my shoulder blades. It felt like a huge pressure my upper back as if someone was applying a slow, crushing force deep into my spine. It started to become hard to concentrate. Around this time, it dawned on me that I might die. I suppose large parts of me had already died, I just didn’t know it yet. Although that apparently was entirely acceptable as long as my new designer frames were safe.

I’m aware that this story is many things, but one thing it is not is relatable. I doubt anyone is reading this and making notes for their next road traffic accident; “so I need to stick the landing legs first,” and the whole event was such a freak accident that it’s unlikely you’ll have a story like mine; and if you do, I’m sorry. It would make for excellent reading if I had, while lying in the road, experienced some profound insight into the universe the frailty of life and my own mortality, the fundamentals of human nature and where I put my favourite headphones in the summer of 2013. It didn’t make me grow or become a better person. Instead, I remember the enormity of the situation saturating my consciousness: an overwhelming, impossible force on my mind, pushing out any rational thought and continuing to push. I couldn’t concentrate or form a rational thought; my brain hadn’t just taken its hands off the wheel; it had abandoned the car altogether. I’m not a religious man, but I now know there are some things in life you can subject a person to, some moments that are so beyond reason that it’s just you and the deity of your choice. There is a flavour of desperation that tastes like madness. I cried out to God. Oh God. Over and over in my mind I repeated the phrase; maybe I was saying it too. But I wasn’t rewarded with a revelatory experience; I found in the face of such mind-altering disaster absolutely nothing. That nothingness was the most barren loneliness I have ever felt. It was just me; everything else was just colours and shapes and far away.
My memories of that day end around the time I got into the ambulance. I would go on to meet my girlfriend in A&E, have a full CT scan, then an MRI, then five hours of emergency surgery while my friends and family waited and contemplated my future in that grey 3 AM hospital twilight nightmare world. The next thing I remember is waking up from a coma 10 days later. I did have my glasses though, the tough little bastards.

One thing that is strange about writing and reflecting on that time is that I say “I”, I’m talking about myself but it really feels like someone else. It’s almost shocking to think that I used to be the way that I was, 23 years old, only concerned with being good at my job, being a good boyfriend, being a good man, my pay check, my rent, saving to buy a house. You know: normal stuff. Waking up every day and just getting out of bed, standing up, walking around like a normal person. Blending in. Being at peace with the small ebbs and flows of a relatively normal life. That feels like a dream now, an impossibly realistic, detailed, years long dream, and that boy that I used to be is a different person, a ghost that will always follow me around, haunting me sometimes, helping me sometimes. I hope he is happy and proud of me despite everything.

Oh, and yes; that photo is real. It’s from the police report. That’s what a bike looks like after you hit a car with it.