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my accident

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to describe my accident. It’s been just over 3 months since my motorcycle slipped on the wet mountain road between Chiang Mai and Pai and I drove headfirst into an oncoming car. Since then, I’ve had weeks that I can’t remember, feelings that I wish I could forget, and moments that have fundamentally changed my outlook on life. When someone says to me — timidly, as they usually do, concerned that the subject might be too much for me to handle — “I don’t exactly understand what happened”, I don’t know where to start. Its not that I don’t want to talk about it, but instead that I don’t know how to relay to someone in a few sentences an experience of such proportion. Subjecting them to an eight-hour chronological account of every memory is too much. Any less, and they’re only getting part of the picture.

More recently, I’ve started to realize that my memory of events is also shifting. All memories change or shift with time. Some — like the 57th time that a younger me choked down week-old stir-fry in my dilapidated undergraduate house — I have all but forgotten, and that is fine with me. However, the memories of my accident and the events proceeding it have shaped me, and as painful as some are, I do not wish to lose them to time.

So, I have decided to write my memories down; in part, as an effort of conservation; in part, as a form of processing; in part, for the people who “don’t exactly understand what happened”. This is my memory of what happened.

I rented a motorbike in Chiang Mai on the morning of Oct 21, 2022. After nearly two months of solo travel, I had ridden motorbikes dozens of times throughout southern Thailand, and intended to continue doing so for the following 6 months throughout of the rest of South East Asia. I hoped to share some of the upcoming journey with my close friends from Canada (Regan, Jac, Mike, and Levi) who I had just met up with in Bangkok. Most recently, I had just recovered from a brutal stomach bug which had conveniently announced itself the morning of a 3-day jungle trek with my Canadian friends. I had spent the last several days thinking I was enduring the “big health crisis” of my backpacking trip. I was wrong.

The plan was to drive from Chiang Mai to Pai, a smaller city near the border of Myanmar. Pai is known amongst backpackers for being a “chill spot” where a wandering backpacker who doesn’t need to be anywhere anytime soon can easily get “stuck in a Pai-hole”. There was a bus available to Pai, but many complained of sickness or discomfort due to the steep, twisting mountain roads. To avoid discomfort and to make things more fun, my friends and I opted to drive there. I was riding my bike alone, my backpack tied to the rear of the bike with resistance bands in a move which I remember feeling quite proud of. Jac and Regan rode a bike together, and Mike and Levi each rode bikes alone. There was another guy, a random traveller who asked to come with us for company. I don’t know his name, and I could walk right past him on the street and not recognize him… but he was there too. We set off mid-morning, with full tanks of gas, helmets on — yes, I was wearing a helmet — and the Google maps lady occasionally yelling directions from a Bluetooth speaker I used to blast road tunes.

We spent the morning weaving through bumper-to-bumper traffic on the main highway out of the city. Slowly, gridlocked pavement turned into open road as the large concrete buildings dissipated and lush tropical forest emerged. After exiting the highway, we stopped for lunch at a tiny rural restaurant which was clearly caught off-guard by the sudden occupancy of six very hungry foreigners. After lunch, we began our ascent into the mountain.

I remember stopping several times on the mountain. We stopped to look at the map, stopped to make sure we hadn’t lost anyone behind us, and stopped to visit a national park. I remember feeling frustrated that, for the first time in almost 60 days, I had opted to wear shoes instead of my usual Teva sandals, which would have been much more convenient as we trekked through a river and climbed up the side of a waterfall to inspect a bat cave. An hour or two later, those shoes undoubtedly saved my feet from severe lacerations, likely saved them from broken bones, and maybe are the reason I was able to take a walk this morning before I started writing all of this down.

Our last stop — technically second-to-last, I guess — was at an unnaturally flattened patch of grass overlooking green mountains and valleys below. In an effort to piece together bits of memory (which are few and far between proceeding this stop), I went back recently and found this location on Google Maps. “Rak Chang Viewpoint” is a landmark 53 minutes by car from the centre of Pai and was the last place I put feet on solid ground before my accident.

Leaving Rak Chang Viewpoint, I remember Jac and Regan leaving first, then Levi left next. Getting cold from how high up we were, I was the last ready to leave, but I remember Mike waiting for me as I threw on my raincoat to block out the wind. I remember starting out with Mike, eventually falling into line a few seconds ahead of him. I remember catching up with Levi a few minutes later, still climbing upwards, if memory serves. I remember looking down and slowing my bike as I realized the road had become wet, presumably from a rainstorm recently passed-through.

The next memory I have is an image — a moment in tunnel vision surrounded by blackness. I am sitting on the side of the road. On my right there is someone sitting beside me, either Levi or Michael, saying something to me that I can’t understand. On my left, the road turns away from me and then goes steeply upwards. In front of me there is a Thai man wearing an official looking outfit — maybe camouflage. He has a phone in my face and appears to be taking a picture of me. There are other people around, doing I don’t know what. Then blackness.

From this point on, my memory is really complicated. “Blurry” or “fragmented” don’t really capture it; to me, “blurry” implies a set of clear chronological moments connected by more translucent ones; “fragmented” implies lots of clear memories that are just out of order. I have neither a clear timeline nor a wealth of distinct, identifiable moments from the following ~2 weeks of my life. What I have is the stories from the people who selflessly came to my aid, and a handful of random images and other sensations I can try to link them to. I will tell the story as I understand it to be true, although some parts are surely out of order, and I almost certainly will not tell it accurately all the way through — I’m not sure anyone could.

According to people who were at the scene, my bike had slipped on the road long (in meters, short in time) before I collided with the car. This was evidenced by a long, black gash cut into the road starting partway up the hill and ending where the car, a white sedan, sat with a large, motorcycle-sized dent in the front bumper. As it turned out, I was not the only one who had slipped; in our Whatsapp group, Regan had sent a text saying that she and Jac and Mr. I-cannot-remember-his-name had just slipped on the wet road, but they were alright. She had warned us to be careful. Looking back at the timestamp of the message, this must have been within moments of when I slipped and fell.

Nobody really knows what side I fell onto, the position of my body relative to the motorcycle as we slid in unison down the hill, or in what order the parts of me and the parts of the bike collided with the car. The driver and passenger of the car, a Thai couple, might have more answers, but I don’t have their contact information. Levi and Mike were just slightly too far behind to witness what must have started and ended in less than 5 seconds. Regan, Jac, and Mr Whatshisface were just slightly too far ahead.

When Mike arrived first at the scene, he said my body was halfway under the front of the car, between the two front wheels. He said he thought I was dead. Levi arrived seconds or minutes after. I told Levi and Mike much later that I wished they had taken more photos of the scene for me to post on Instagram. They told me that, unfortunately, they were too busy trying to stop the blood leaking from all over my body to properly document the moment.

An ambulance eventually arrived at the scene with two paramedics from Pai Hospital. I was placed on a stretcher in a neck brace, and a make-shift splint made out of a piece of car bumper was fastened to my wrist which was, for lack of a better term, “mangled”. People picked up various personal items of mine which had been strewn across the road from my ripped backpack, including a backup iPhone which had been bent through the center at a 45-degree angle, and a case of Airpods which had a hole in the centre as though someone had shot a bullet through it. My Bluetooth speaker, on the other hand, was completely unscathed. -2 points for Apple, +1 point for the UE Wonderboom 2.

In an attempt at coordination which still baffles me and my family, the ambulance drivers apparently decided that the best course of action was for Mike to drive down to Pai on his bike, the ambulance driver to drive to Pai on Levi’s bike, and Levi to stay in the back of the ambulance with me while the other paramedic drove. This left Levi alone, in the back of an ambulance with no healthcare professionals, and nothing to do but watch my dangerously low pulse beep along on the heartrate monitor. In retrospect, for me to flatline at this moment was totally within the realm of possibility. Levi says that as we snaked through the mountain on the way down to Pai, the gurney I was placed on wobbled and rolled back and forth in the cabin so much that he had to press down on my chest to keep me from rolling right off onto the floor. I remember a brief moment of levity in the eye of the storm where I opened my eyes and said “Levi, can you hold me a bit lighter, I can’t breathe”. I took Levi’s intense brace as a sign of love, and I think I may have laughed.

I remember almost nothing from Pai Hospital, the first hospital I was admitted to. Looking at the medical documentation I have now — the hastily scrawled notes of tests results — it seems my triage involved a lot of different assessments done in a hurry. One of these assessments was a CT scan, the results of which are the only moment I remember. I am lying in a hospital bed and someone says “his brain is bleeding, we need to transfer him to Chiang Mai”. People start moving, and my memory of Pai Hospital ends.

The ~3 hour high-speed ambulance journey back over the mountain to Chiang Mai is another experience I have almost no memory of, but there is one distinct memory I do have, and I don’t think I will ever forget it. I suddenly needed to throw up, and when I did so into a bag, I remember the flow of blood that came out of my mouth. I suppose everyone experiences shock in different ways — some frightened or anxious, some less-so. I remember feeling dissociated more than anything else. I looked at the blood and thought “hm, that’s interesting”, almost as though indifferent.

My next set of memories is bizarrely positive in contrast to the last, thanks, at least in part, to the copious opioids (morphine, oxycodone, methadone, and one or two others that I can’t remember) that I started receiving in the Chiang Mai ICU. For about a day, I remember “bouncing back”. I remember laughing with Levi and Mike and being stoked to watch Batman on Netflix all day (this was before the realization that screens were probably not such a good idea). I remember getting on the phone with my parents and telling them that after I was all patched up, I would not be coming home but instead continuing on to Vietnam as I had originally intended. I remember posting an Instagram story showcasing the view from my hospital bed with the caption “oops”. On one hand, I cringe now at some of these moments, the classic youthful misconception of immortality still evident in my actions. On the other hand, I think it is this optimism, the source of which I cannot point to, that got me through the lows which were to follow and is the reason I am able to speak calmly about my experience today.

Delirium is a state of extreme confusion and disorientation which can be brought on by certain medicines or surgery, among other things, and is somewhat similar (symptomatically) to dementia. My delirium began about 24 hours into my hospitalization in Chiang Mai, and from this point until several weeks later my memory is even worse than before. I was often conscious and interacting with the people around me, but there are countless videos, photos, and stories about this period where I was present and conscious but cannot remember being there.

Of the memories I do have from my time in delirium, I do not know the order in which they occurred. Windowless with bright, white, 24-hour lights, the ICU gave not even a sense of the time of day, creating an indefiniteness that I do not look back upon fondly. So, the following are some highlights from my time in delirium, provided in completely random order.

Wrist

I watched a doctor (discernable from everyone else by their white robes) walk into my ICU room, come to my bedside and swiftly cut off the temporary bandage wrapped around my left wrist. Seeing it for what felt like the first time since my accident, my wrist had swollen to several times its usual size and was bent at an angle at which wrists are definitely not supposed to bend. It was explained to me that I had fractured four different bones in my arm, three in the wrist joint and one in the forearm. Surgery was required, but before the procedure could be carried out, my dislocated wrist needed to be put back in place.

A nurse arrived and placed the index and middle finger of my left hand in a metal wire contraption that functioned like a Chinese finger trap — the harder I pulled to get my fingers free, the tighter it held on to them. The contraption was then hung from a metal bar above my bed so that my left arm was held out to my side, my elbow cocked at a 45-degree angle and my fingers pointing to the ceiling. Several more nurses entered, and I realized that what they were about to do might hurt. The nurses crowded around me, holding my arm in different places. The doctor then got to his knees under my arm and told me to stay still. He grabbed my arm at the elbow with both hands, and using all of his weight, pulled down. I remember extreme pain, the look of intense exertion on the doctor’s face, the appearance of my fingers, now pale white in the trap, and thinking that the wire holding them in place might very well cut through my skin at any moment. Then nothing.

Seizure

I remember sitting in my hospital bed and people milling around the room. I noticed that my right hand was numb, and it was doing something funny. I held it up to examine it, and noticed the funny feeling was travelling up my right arm. A second later, my whole right arm started shaking uncontrollably. I mumbled something along the lines of “um, guys, something weird is happening”. I held up my left arm, still bandaged, for comparison, and suddenly my left arm started shaking too. It didn’t hurt, exactly, but my inability to control my own body was frightening. The people in the room started running around. Then blackness.

Video

At some point, my sister Frankie and dear friend Eva selflessly abandoned their goings-on in Canada and flew across the world at a moment’s notice to relieve Mike and Levi from their caretaker duties. Frankie and Eva established a schedule so that someone was by my side 24/7. Frankie took the day shifts, and Eva took the night. I don’t remember their arrival, but perhaps my first memory of their presence was, before Levi and Mike left, watching a video that Levi had compiled of my friends from home and abroad wishing me well. I cried while watching, and about halfway through 12 minutes of familiar faces I had to turn it off. I remember looking up at Levi, Mike, Frankie, and Eva and recognizing the absolute dependence that I had developed on these individuals. Considering the state I was in, I don’t even know for certain that all four of them were in the room, but in my mind they were all there, taking care of me. For me, in that moment, I felt deeply the direness of my situation, and felt deeply surrounded by love.

Teeth

There was something under my tongue. In the accident, I hit my chin incredibly hard against the car and/or motorcycle and/or road — hard enough to open up a three-inch gash along the ridge of my chin and jaw. In the process, I had also bit down on my tongue, which, in addition to being cut and deformed, had swollen to take up what felt like twice its usual real estate in my mouth. I opened my mouth and stuck the fingers of my good hand inside, fishing for whatever was in there. What I pulled out was white, hard, and irregular in shape. Frankie was there, and I remember saying to her “Frankie, what is this?”. Frankie replied something along the lines of “oh, not again…”. Apparently, this was happening a lot.

Jaw

I don’t remember going into or coming out of jaw surgery, but I’m told it lasted 4 or 5 hours. The doctor, a plastic surgeon, did not have to make an incision, but instead took advantage of the 3-inch hole I had already created in my chin. I had shattered part of my mandible (jawbone) near the point where it hinges on the skull, and the objective was to reset my jaw. This involved making sure that the top teeth (coming out of my skull) aligned with the bottom teeth (coming out of my jaw), and the solution was to put metal braces on both top and bottom teeth, then attach as many elastic bands as possible between the two to hold my jaw in place. This meant that for the next three weeks, I would be unable to open my mouth. After 2 months of eating amazing Pad Thai and mango sticky rice, I was now on a strict regiment of meals through a straw. I remember the first time I came to consciousness and realized that my jaw was wired shut and there was nothing I could do about it. Through unconsensually gritted teeth, I let out a defeated groan.

Hose

Maybe for some people this one is TMI. But I think it’s funny.

When you are unable to take care of yourself in hospital, there are some things you endure, out of necessity, that can be quite humiliating. For instance, the first month I was in hospital I was unable to stand, never mind take a shower, and so nurses would clean my body with wet cloths every morning as I begrudgingly lay there trying to imagine I was literally anywhere else. Usually, however, embarrassing moments such as these were anticipated, and I understood them as necessary. Such was not the case with my enema.

Globally, it is common practice for any patient receiving regular doses of opioids to also be prescribed laxatives. Unfortunately, the folks at the hospital in Chiang Mai seemed to have missed that class, and eventually my sister (a nurse) pointed out that I had not had a bowel movement in a week and a half. Still delirious, this meant next to nothing to me, but I remember Frankie leaving to discuss options with the healthcare staff. Apparently, there was an urgency to the matter — though what that was, I do not know — and instead of laxatives, my sister requested a suppository, a medication which quickly resolves constipation but is painless. Unfortunately, a language barrier between my English-speaking sister and the Thai staff meant that, unbeknownst to Frankie and I, there was something else in store for me.

A curtain barrier was drawn between myself and Frankie, and two nurses began undressing me. Disoriented and also somewhat panicked now, I had truly no idea what was going on. As the nurses rolled me, naked, onto my side, I heard the hospital room telephone ring and Frankie answer it. It was the Canadian consulate calling to see how I was doing. It was at this moment, without warning, that a hard, seemingly unlubricated plastic hose was forced up my anus. My last memory is screaming at Frankie “what the FUCK is going on?!?” before everything goes blank. Frankie, who was attempting to engage in a relatively formal conversation with the Canadian government, said it took everything in her power not to break down laughing.

I remember almost no lead-up to my brain surgery. Still disoriented most of the time, I don’t remember the discussions about CT scans which showed a thick layer of blood expanding along the left hemisphere of my brain. I don’t remember the innumerable conversations that my sister and Eva had with the doctors about how I kept saying my right hand was going numb. Apparently, the first time Eva brought this to their attention, it was dismissed as a result of us keeping the air conditioning too high in my room. The first two neurosurgeons that Frankie talked to said it was due to a pinched nerve and was nothing that required immediate attention. But Frankie, who works as an exceptional nurse back in Canada, was not satisfied with this, and her determination is the reason I still have a functional right arm.

It was the third neurosurgeon that Frankie consulted who said the numbness in my arm may represent imminent threat. The CT scans of my brain (taken quite regularly, as far as I remember) now indicated that my brain had been pushed seven millimeters away from the brain’s midline. As rule of thumb, any further than a five-millimeter shift from the midline is dangerous; as the brain shifts, the brainstem (connecting the brain to the spine) begins to be squeezed against skull and vertebrae, potentially permanently severing part of it. The numbness in my arm was the beginning of my arm being cut off from my central nervous system.

I was told I would be having brain surgery three hours before it took place. I had not been a part of the decision-making process, but I did not argue when Frankie sat down next to me, held up my Dad on Facetime (awake at 2 AM on the other side of the world), and told me they were going to cut a large hole in my skull and scrape out the blood. The head pain I had experienced since my accident had been unbearable, and anything that offered relief was welcome as far as I was concerned. Further, there was a sense of quiet determination in Frankie and Dad’s voices that I dared not quarrel with. I could see in their eyes and hear in their voices that they were as scared as I was, but that this was the right call.

Three unmemorable hours later, they came to get me. For whatever reason, the hospital staff were insistent that I wear nothing but a surgery gown which looked like it was sized appropriately for a five-foot-tall Thai woman. I changed, and then as I lay down on the gurney to be wheeled off, that’s when it hit me. I started crying, and begged Frankie to walk with me until they wouldn’t let her go any further. She forced her way right to the operating room doors and kissed my forehead before they rolled me into the room. I lay there, too scared to move, as people milled about above me speaking in Thai. Eventually, someone came with scissors and began cutting all the elastics between my teeth. “For intubation”, they said. For a moment, I revelled at the ability to open my mouth for the first time in weeks. A moment later, I heard “okay, I make you go sleep now”. I remember thinking about how in the movies they tell you to count backwards from 10. I don’t think I even got to 9.

I woke up shaking uncontrollably. I was on a gurney but was not moving. I believe I may have still been in the operating room. There were hospital staff all around me, but nobody seemed to notice me. In addition to the shaking, there was a screaming pain coming from my skull, somehow orders of magnitude worse than what I had already experienced before. I tried to rotate my head and realized that there was a plastic hose which had been sutured into the top of my head and was draining blood into a bottle at my side. Days later I realized that this hose was only draining blood from the space between my scalp and my skull but, in that moment, I believed it was draining directly from my brain. I thought surely someone would soon come to my side to explain what had happened, to offer me some comfort, to hold my hand. Nobody did. Even when I was wheeled out of the operating room and into the ICU, nobody made any effort to comfort me, or even speak to me. Too shocked to formulate words, I basically just lay there and prayed that someone would eventually come and save me. To my sister’s fury, I found out later it took them well over an hour after the end of my surgery to come and let her know it was over.

Even when Frankie did arrive at around 9 PM, there was not much she could do. Loving sister that she is, she sat with me, held my hand and talked to me, but eventually — maybe out of pity for her, I don’t know why — I told her to go to bed at the hotel across the street. This was a mistake which precipitated the worst twelve hours of my life.

I don’t really know how to adequately describe the experience of being 6 hours into constant, mind-boggling pain with no end in sight and nobody there to comfort you. At 3 AM I called two nurses, assigned solely to my care, into my room and begged them for more morphine. They said they could not provide any more painkillers until the doctor approved it in the morning. Not having drank water since 2 PM on the previous day, I begged them to give me any water, even a few drops, to moisten my completely dry mouth and peeling lips. They said they could not provide any water until the doctor approved it in the morning. I asked when the doctor would be in, they said 10 AM. I asked them, begged them to do literally anything to help me. I remember them looking at me blankly, silently, before they turned and walked out of the room.

At around 6 AM I had the first and only panic attack I think I’ve ever had. Frantically, I called the nurses and asked them to bring me my phone. Looking at the time, I knew there was a greater likelihood of my parents picking up than Frankie. I called my Dad on Facetime, but when my parents picked up the phone I froze, mouth ajar. I remember seeing my image in the little video of myself on the bottom right-hand corner of the screen and barely recognizing what I saw. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t blink. I just stared at the screen. I remember my mom asking if I needed Frankie, and Dad leaving to call her. I guess eventually my parents realized that this call was not going to involve a conversation, because my Mom just began instructing me to breathe: four seconds in, and five seconds out, with the same emphasis on the exhale as we did in yoga class together back in Canada. Dad later told me that Mom did this with me for the better part of an hour until Frankie was able to wake, dress, and run to the ICU.

Traumatizing as this experience was for me, I think it was equally so for my parents, just in a different way. When Frankie did arrive, we ended the call with my parents to give them a break, and instead I was placed on a call with Eva who was now back in Canada. For the next 24 hours, any time Frankie needed to leave the room, I was placed on a call with Eva, who sat in silence, sometimes for hours, waiting to jump to my aid and call Frankie if I requested it. Frankie, meanwhile, was in protective-sister-overdrive, ripping into the nurses and doctors for not taking adequate care of me, for giving me medications she had told them gave me anxiety, for refusing to call the doctor and get permission to give me water. That day she checked out of her hotel, and she slept on the tiny couch in my hospital room every night afterwards until we went home.

About 48 hours after my surgery, the pain began to rapidly decrease, and by a month and a half later it was basically gone. I think the essence of this experience, however, will live on with me in some form for the rest of my life. It doesn’t haunt me, but it underlines to me the absolute privilege with which I lived the first twenty-four years of my life and marks a turning point for me in my understanding of pain, mortality, and suffering as they pertain to the human experience.

The manner in which the neurosurgeon conducted my post-surgical follow-ups was nothing short of comical. He was a man who always had a smile on his face, did everything in a hurry, clearly thought my sister and I were morons, and, adhering to the stereotype, had an ego so big it barely fit in the hospital room.

The first time he came to me, he said he was there to change my bandage. What he did not mention, however, was that he also intended to rip the blood-drainage hose out of my scalp. He did so with no warning and no painkiller — just yanked it out of there and dabbed the open wound until it stopped bleeding. With a smile, he offered for me to keep the bottle of blood it had been draining into.

The second time he came to me, he said he was there to remove the staples in my head. Frankly, I hadn’t known there were staples in my head. Turns out there were 33 of them, each of industrial strength and size — notably longer and thicker than your run-of-the-mill staple — which were there to hold my scalp together after it was peeled in half on the operating table. With a pair of pliers and the same jovial attitude as the last visit, he went to work pulling them out, with me wincing at each removal, and my sister holding the staple collection jar which he had condescendingly suggested she might be capable of “because she is a nurse”.

The third and final time he came to me, he said it was to remove my bandage. He also, however, seemed very excited to share with us a new TikTok that he had just posted. Brandishing his phone, he showed us a video that followed him grabbing a coffee, entering the hospital, receiving warm hellos from a host of female coworkers, throwing on his surgical gloves, and then operating on a brain — MY brain. The video, which had been posted that morning and had 500K views, was not personally identifying, but my sister and I were still shocked that he had coordinated a whole minivlog about my brain surgery without ever asking my permission. As the surgeon yammered on about his TikTok following, Liam, my wonderful friend who had now also pressed pause on his life to come keep me company, piped up and said “um, I think you missed a staple”. Sure enough, there was an extra staple still stuck in my head. With a laugh, the neurosurgeon got out his pliers again and pulled out the last staple, his clear oversight shedding off his conscience as easily as water off Gore-tex.

Not once in my entire hospital visit was a neurological assessment conducted — not before, or after my surgery. I was never asked when my head hurt, where it hurt, or how it hurt. Nobody ever asked if my arm was still numb, or how my balance was. They didn’t comment on how long I should keep taking antiseizure medication, or what activities I should avoid after discharge. In this hospital, whose patient base appeared to be about 50% white dudes who had just crashed a motorcycle, the moto was opioid, operation, and au revoir.

The last aspect that I feel is crucial to a holistic understanding of my experience is knowing what it was like to heal, to become a semi-autonomous person, to have a semblance of a life again. After spending what felt like an eternity lying in a dark and silent hospital room — a sensory deprivation chamber where the only sensation is your splitting headache — the most trivial of sensations and experiences become food for the soul. I wanted to document some of my favourites here.

The first time I listened to music after my accident, it was intoxicating. For over a month, I had been so sensitive to noise that I could not even listen to podcasts or audiobooks. When Frankie finally turned on my Bluetooth speaker and cued up some of my favourite country songs, it was genuinely like a drug. I could FEEL the dopamine and serotonin rush into my brain. We listened for hours, Frankie dancing around the hospital room and me sitting immobile but ecstatic, singing along at the top of my lungs. To top it off, this shock to the system repeated itself for every genre that I loved. The next day, playing cards with Liam, jazz soothed the anxiety right out of my body in a way that the hospital’s pills never had. I bopped my head for hours to hip-hop and hyper pop, happy-cried to EDM, and would have gotten up and moshed to Midwest Emo if my legs had permitted it.

At night when Frankie and I were falling asleep in the dark, I found myself surprisingly and sufficiently unburdened by pain that we could just talk. Suddenly, our relationship started to transform from caretaker/patient to friends. I will always hold dearly those nights spent reconnecting with my sister, sharing our lives, fears, and hopes for the future after years spent apart. We became best friends in that hospital room, a silver lining that I will benefit from for the rest of my life.

When my jaw was finally strong enough, consuming food which had never seen the inside of a blender was thrilling. With numerous fractured teeth and tender jaw muscles, I was still restricted to soft foods, but I didn’t care. I vividly remember eating — or, rather, inhaling — my first Pad Thai so quickly that I sent myself into a fit of hiccups. Ice cream bars were a welcome addition to my diet which I often unabashedly ate at breakfast time. It was cheesecake, however, that really took the cake. Offered at the 7–11 just down the street, cheesecakes could be purchased by the slice for just over a dollar. I requested a new haul every time Frankie or Liam left the hospital for some fresh air, and it was later calculated that I probably ate forty-some cheesecakes in two weeks’ time. Having lost so much weight, I felt this was more than justified. The consumption only stopped when, one evening on a cheesecake run, Liam regrettably informed us that there were no cheesecakes left; we had eaten the 7–11 dry.

As simple as it is, even laughter was a novelty item which had to be reintroduced to me. Sitting bored out of our minds in the hospital room, laughter, which had once been foreign to the space, became commonplace. Humor was what filled our days, and I remember feeling so grateful to have Liam and Frankie there to bring it back into my life.

Finally, I feel nothing epitomized the reclamation of my life more than learning to use my body again. To be clear, it is not so much my brain that had forgotten how to move as my body itself. One day, a doctor came into my room, pulled the sheets off my bed, and proclaimed that my legs had begun to atrophy. I had been lying in bed so long that I had sores on my back. I had lost 30 pounds and could barely stand up.

The first time I remember walking, I did so in secret; nobody else was in the room, and I needed to pee. Since admission to the hospital, I had been peeing in a bottle emptied every few hours by a nurse, a process which fit squarely into the category of humiliating experiences as I described before. In an act of defiance to my pee bottle and determination to regain autonomy, I threw my legs over the edge of my bed and slowly stood. I took three steps forward, leaned on a table to catch my breath and balance, then took the final three steps to the bathroom. By the time I had made the return trip to my bed, I was exhausted, and slept for the next five hours. But I had walked, and this filled me with a sense of hunger for life that got me out of bed each day for a little bit longer, a couple steps further. I insisted on being part of making breakfast (oatmeal that Frankie usually cheffed-up in the microwave), even if the 3 steps to the counter, 5 minutes of sitting at the table, and 3 steps back to bed were enough to flatten me for the day. I demanded that I be properly equipped to take my own shower (seated), a process which took 10 times longer than a bed bath, required that I be covered with various plastic bags to protect bandages, and could only be done one-handed (my other hand still in a cast). But the autonomy was worth it.

Before my accident, I knew intellectually that an able body and mind was a privilege. Now I know it viscerally. I know it viscerally that it is a privilege to not be in pain. I know it viscerally that it is a privilege to be able to speak. I know it viscerally that it is a privilege to be able to open my eyes and comprehend the world around me. I know it viscerally that it is a privilege to be able to walk to my Mom in the Montreal-Pierre Elliot Trudeau Airport and hold her as she cries. Standing. Breathing. Alive

Note: As a creative exercise, I wanted to focus this article on my memories of the most acute moments in my journey — the extreme highs and lows — and be honest with myself about what I could remember and what I could not (e.g., stories that had been told to me). It is important to me to mention that in between these highs and lows, in the often blank spaces in my memory, there were people working selflessly around the clock to make sure I would be okay. They are not all mentioned equally in this article (some not at all), but all of them made generous sacrifices that enabled me to come out of this as unscathed as I have. Thank you, Eva, Gabe, Liam, Levi, Mike, Christine, Randy, Peter, Marilee, Kevin, Frankie, Mom, Dad, and so many others for giving me a second shot at life.

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