It was a late afternoon in the Summer of 2021. A Friday just like any other, except that day I was a passenger in a small hatchback heading back from Kings Heath.
I always find on Fridays, the people out driving back home from work are nuts. They’ve had enough of the week at work and they either just want to get home or they’re in a mad rush to get somewhere else.
I was already well aware of this, but I wasn’t driving, neither was it a long expedition. On the way back I was relaxed, chatting away, and then the next thing I knew, mid-sentence, a car smashed into us without braking at what must have been about 40mph.
The hatchback I was in was basically a tin can with no real safety features other than a seat belt and a head restraint, which I hadn’t thought to look at prior to getting in the car. The head restraint wasn’t well adjusted so my head snapped back over the back of it upon impact.
The car hit us so hard that we basically got penalty-kicked about 27 yards out of one road into another. The road we were smashed into is notoriously busy at that time of day and if a car had been heading down it at that exact moment, one of us would either have been critically injured or killed.
Thankfully, God had our back that day and we hit the sweet spot with no oncoming traffic for a few seconds. Long enough for us to come to a standstill.
Getting out of the car, looking back on it now, I was pretty concussed. It was reminiscent of a scene out of Pulp Fiction. Like being hit hard around the head with a baseball bat and you’re not quite sure what you did to deserve it. In visceral terms, my brain equated this to being physically assaulted by the person driving the other vehicle, as crazy as that sounds. In medieval times I would have got out swinging an axe, but we have to be civilised in the 21st Century, don’t we.
The car I had been a passenger in was somewhat squashed and it was written off by the insurers. I felt every bit of the impact. It was like the car hadn’t absorbed any of the energy whatsoever. A very visceral and frightening experience as anyone that has been in a serious car crash will confirm. For some reason it feels even worse when you’re not the one driving, because you replay the same incident to decide if it would have happened at all if you were behind the wheel instead.
From what I recall, even the driver’s airbag failed to deploy and the laughable thing was, while we were stumbling around in a daze, the incompetent driver of the other vehicle, who was still fresh as a daisy, tried to blame the driver of the vehicle I was in.
I had whiplash, which wasn’t the end of the world, but the accident did something to my lower back, which must have damaged some nerves or something along these lines. I used to hook myself up to a TENS machine just to temporarily distract my brain from the sensations. It was excruciating and debilitating for months, but here’s the thing about pain…
Nobody can see it.
Empathy only works if someone else has gone through the same experience. If you smashed someone’s hand with a hammer and said, “This is what I’m feeling,” they would be on the same page as you pretty fucking fast.
But when someone is feeling good, generally speaking, they don’t REALLY care how you are feeling or what you are enduring, because they are just too damn busy feeling good (lol). People draw on experiences for empathy. If they’ve been there, they know the roadmap back to being human again. You can’t walk a mile in someone else’s shoes if you only own a pair of flip-flops.
The next best thing is finding someone who is good at what they do so they can help you recover, but the psychological aspects of it usually aren’t addressed and you have to come to terms with that on your own, or with the help of an expert that bills you at £50+ an hour, in between checking their watch.
I had physio for a number of weeks, but the physio guy was a rank amateur. He spent most of his time telling me about his new motorbike and dates he’d gone on over the weekend. In short, he was in love with the sound of his own voice and about as much use as a condom with a hole in at helping people with their injuries. I don’t know how people like this end up in gainful employment.
I quietly ended up in a dark place because of what had happened and it was a long road back to being fully functional again. It’s amazing what you take for granted until it has been taken away from you.
Exercise has always been a big part of my life and not being able to do that with the frequency or intensity I had been used to prior to the accident was a bitter pill to swallow. Trying to focus on anything whilst sitting down was challenging, to say the least. Nothing I did seemed to alleviate the pain to a major degree, which lasted from when I woke up to when I went to sleep.
Don’t get me wrong, it could have been worse. At least I could come back from it, but I had times where I was just trying to get through to the next day. I didn’t articulate this to anyone else because nobody really wants to hear it and ultimately you are on your own with whatever demons you have to deal with. In the meantime, you just soldier on with existence of sorts.
I knew how Reginald Perrin felt when he went to walk off into the sea and just let the waves wash over him until the pain went away. I totally understood and sometimes imagined what this would feel like. To me it conjured up images of feeling relaxed as I thought about just sinking to the bottom. I know how disturbing that sounds, but there was a sort of poetry to the notion of it at the same time. More a powerful thought than something I would actually do, but the thought was there all the same.
Eventually joy comes back into your life, like an old friend you’d forgotten to keep in touch with. You suddenly realise you feel alive again, living in the moment, which comes as a shock as you then realise what you are coming out of and how long you’ve been there treading water.
Because of the crash, I don’t take anything or anyone for granted now.
It does make you find out who you really are, deep down. People spend their days being consumed with trivial things that don’t really matter. This is something I see all the time on social media and I just think to myself, “The world is already yours. You have everything and you don’t even realise it.” If it doesn’t matter in 5 years from now, it shouldn’t matter at the time either. This is an easy thing to forget.
Now I’m through it, I believe it has made me a better human being, so even though the price you pay doesn’t always seem worth it, there’s usually a reason for everything even if it isn’t obvious at the time.
My next post will contain much more levity. I’m just reflecting on this event 🙂
Thanks for reading. See you in the next one.
Let’s play this one out with In For The Kill by La Roux (incidentally the album this track’s on is excellent).