posted on Jan, 20 2014 @ 06:21 PM
GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING
Way back when I was fifteen years old, I was involved in a serious road traffic accident.
The first I knew about it was when I awoke in an intensive care unit, around three weeks after the event.
The story:
From the age of eleven, until the day of my accident at the age of fifteen, I was up every morning at 05:30 to cycle my paper route before embarking
on a twenty five mile round trip to my secondary school, I did this through choice because I wanted a new bicycle for my eleventh birthday and didn't
want to put up with the bus trip every day.
On the morning of the 5th March 1992, during my paper round, the chain on my mountain bike snapped and after walking home I managed to arrange a lift
to school with a neighbour and friend who was nineteen at the time, he drove a twenty year old Morris marina, as you can probably imagine at the age
of nineteen he didn't drive it how it was designed to be driven, not that I, as a teenager, objected whatsoever.
The main road was blocked from an accident already so we took some of the back roads which were slightly rough country lanes.
We approached a humpback train bridge at around seventy miles an hour and the vehicle left the ground as we hit the peak of the bridge, on landing the
front suspension collapsed and pulled us head on in to oncoming traffic traveling at the national speed limit, which is sixty miles an hour.
After this initial impact we were left sideways across both carriageways, both conscious and with only mild injuries I released my seatbelt and moved
to open the passenger door, as I did so the second car, also traveling at around sixty miles an hour crashed in to my door, closing it and crushing me
in to the gear box of our vehicle, my head was thrown through the glass of the passenger window, my left leg was snapped half way up my shin and I
recieved a keloid fracture to my thigh bone as it was folded under the seat I was sat in, my right thigh was also broken but didn't penetrate the
skin.
I swallowed a mouthful of glass as my head smashed through the window, which blocked my airway, I suffered major internal bleeding and a ruptured
spleen.
The top and left hand side of my face was shredded from my head as we were flipped over the second car and I was dragged almond the Tarmac whilst
still trapped in the car.
The three cars involved were the only vehicles using the country lane at the time and all involved were left unconscious or incapacitated.
By the most incredible stroke of luck for me, the first person to arrive at the scene of the accident was a student nurse on her way home from a night
shift at the nearest hospital about ten miles away, she saw I was in need of help and performed an emergency tracheotomy on the spot without
hesitation using a scalpel from her kit and a birro pen as a tube, she then resuscitated me and kept me alive until the ambulance arrived.
Apparently the paramedics commented that I had very little chance of survival considering my injuries, but they persisted with thier care, pumping
eighteen pints of blood in to my body as it constantly flowed from my wounds during the two hours it took for the fire brigade to free me from the
mangled wreckage.
When the emergency services arrived at the hospital with me the doctors said that they would have to amputate both my legs to save me, but as I went
in to surgery, a doctor, just starting his shift said that he wanted to try and drill and pin my legs back together along the centre of the bones,
this was something that had never been done at this particular hospital, although the technique was just starting to be used elsewhere.
Twelve hours later, the internal bleeding had been stemmed, my spleen has been removed, my right leg had been stitched from my ankle to my groin, both
legs had been pinned and screwed, my open wounds and face had been cleaned and treated
And I was placed in intensive care on a ventilator and life support systems.
Within six months I was out of my wheelchair and once again cycling the twenty five mile round trip to school.
I often wonder if we do realy live in parallel universes, where each major thing that happens to us does actually kill us in another reality, but we
always survive in the universe we occupy, where in another life a police officer had to knock on my parents door and tell them that thier son had been
killed in a road traffic accident.
I often wonder if the girl who arrived at the scene had been put there by some higher power.
And I wonder if there was a real reason why I was not supposed to die that day.
All accounts of my accident were relayed to me by witnesses, and I have been told that my brain shut the trauma out, although the police tried to say
that I was covering for my friends stupidity on the road. I assure you I wasn't covering for anyone!
There were a few other strange happenings with that story, the first was that when I initialy woke up in the ICU, I wasn't aware what had happened to
me (I still don't remember to this day, along with a lot of missing childhood memories) I thought I was in some sort of sanitarium with lots of
people tied up to machines, so I grabbed the drip I was connected to and started to walk across the ward, at the very moment I made eye contact with
one of the nurses I collapsed on the floor, they scooped me back up in to bed and explained to me that I couldn't walk because I had two broken legs,
I didn't get to my feet for a month after that until I started to learn to walk again. Nobody could ever explain how I managed to walk the few meters
across the ward.
Secondly a few months after the accident, whilst I was out of hospital on crutches I met a girl I began a relationship with, when I met her parents a
few weeks later, it turned out her father was one of the paramedics that helped to save me at the scene of the accident, small world I guess.
Thirdly and finally, I went back to the hospital for a check up a year after the accident, with the doctor who had performed the amazing surgery on
me, my appointment was in the morning but I sat in the waiting room all day without being seen until they sent me home, and, after arriving back at my
girlfriends house I was told by her father that he attended another road accident that day, and had pulled my doctor from one of the cars, and bless
him he didn't make it.
All a little strange, but I guess I just have to put it all down to coincidence, I can't find any other explanation.
Appologies for the lengthy post but yes, I was lucky. Very lucky!