The SUV slammed into me at a crosswalk, where I had right of way. It was 2024 and I was on the first night of a work trip to New Orleans. Time slowed down as I flew 2 metres through the air and crashed on to the road in what felt like slow motion. When I managed to stand up, there were waves of adrenaline juddering through me. My friend, Brandy, and a group of strangers helped me to the side of the road, and it was then that I remembered my annual travel insurance had expired the week before. In a prim, defensive tone, like a dowager who’d just had a fainting spell and resented all the fuss, I insisted that I was perfectly fine and didn’t need an ambulance. Then I blacked out.
The paramedics arrived and, despite my protests, they wouldn’t take no for an answer. On the stretcher, I started calculating how much money I had in my current account, how much I could put on a credit card and how much I could plausibly ask to borrow from my parents. My lack of insurance was entirely due to my own fecklessness, but being forced to run these sums with a head injury, after begging not to receive help that I obviously needed, was an almost comically bleak experience.
By the time we got to the hospital, I was euphoric: laughing wildly, chatting away with the nurses, and forcing Brandy to take photos of me posing with a tangle of wires hooked to my veins and the self-satisfied smirk of someone who had just cheated death. To my friends, I texted: “OMG I just got run over by a massive truck! I’m in intensive care LOL” and to my mum: “Please do not be alarmed, but I have been involved in a very minor vehicular accident.” My right leg was so swollen I couldn’t bend the knee and just about every part of my body was covered in bruises and grazes, but nothing was broken or bleeding. After running a Cat scan, one doctor told me that my brain was in “exceptionally good health” – a pleasant surprise after a decade of heavy drinking and a weekly screen-time report too shameful to mention.
I spent the next few days recuperating at Brandy’s house, lying on her sofabed, listening to the mournful whistle of freight trains passing by. I had a bad limp and I was a little spaced out, but I was well enough to travel. Watching films on the flight home, I was moved to tears by the climactic scene of Wonka, when Timothée Chalamet realises that what really matters is not the chocolate but who you share it with. Other than that, I was exhibiting few symptoms of brain damage.
But on my first night back in London, I woke up with a bad headache, as if my brain was pressing against my skull. I went to A&E the next morning and passed another round of neurological tests. They sent me away with a leaflet and a tentative diagnosis of post-concussion syndrome – a condition that can last for months or even years. I felt weird: slow, off-kilter, distant and dizzy.
I couldn’t work for more than a month. I didn’t like meeting up with friends, because it seemed so obvious that I could no longer think or speak in the way that I used to. I avoided leaving the house because I often felt on the verge of fainting. I accept that some or even most of these symptoms were psychosomatic, an expression of anxiety more than physical injury, but it was torturously difficult to tell the difference. I had a sentence stuck in my head, the kind of thing you’d hear in a soap opera: “After the accident, he was never the same again.”
It wasn’t a linear process, but over time I did start to feel better. I went back to work and the more effort I made to meet up with people, the easier it became. I was eventually able to sort out the hospital bill through my work’s insurance, so I no longer had to worry about being saddled with $30,000 (£22,000) of medical debt. Still, the accident changed me in lots of ways. I still find myself tensing up if a car drives past too closely, and I no longer have the cavalier, devil-may-care approach to the Green Cross Code that I did in my youth. My sense of empathy has also become sharper: I better understand the truth that anyone can become disabled at any time.
Most of my post-accident resolutions melted away within the year: after surviving what felt like a near-death experience, I decided to read only classical literature and watch only canonical films – why would I waste my precious time on season 4 of The Boys when I could be crushed by an anvil at any moment? But it was only a few months before I gave in to the siren call of airport thrillers and trash TV. Other changes have proven more enduring. I drink a lot less and try to spend less time looking at screens; I no longer take my brain for granted and want to take better care of it. If it’s true that I’ll never be the same again, that might turn out to be a good thing.
