Lying dazed on a downtown street, I looked up at the moving clouds. As I began to focus, I saw a vast, empty road with vague figures in the distance.
I had been riding my bike to do interviews for a pilot radio show. The roads were dry and the wind was with me. But as I powered ahead, one question kept nagging me: What is this van doing so close to me?
It was narrowing the already slim space to the curb, leaving me with little room. Then, after pulling away from an increasingly erratic driver, I turned to see he was coming straight at me. There was no time to move.
The truck not only ran me over, it dragged me under it – for 100 metres or so – before finally coming to a stop.
I knew none of this as I lay there, disoriented. I was thinking, “Phew, I'm not sure what happened there, but I'm probably late now. I'd better find my bike and get a move on.”
But as I tried to get up, my head bobbed up and down uselessly as my body remained pasted to the pavement.
The initial shock gave way to the sick, dawning realization that something horrible had just happened. I tried to move my legs. Nothing. How about my feet? Not a twitch. Nothing moved. I slipped into a still and silent panic. Am I paralyzed?
Finally I tested my fingers and watched them type on an imaginary keyboard, as though they belonged to someone else. My life may be forever altered, but at least I could write.
So there I lay, in the middle of the street, on my back, typing in the air.
The list of injuries was long. It ranged from the almost comically clinical “degloving” of one leg – being shorn of skin and flesh – to fractures in the other. My pelvis, two vertebrae and five ribs were broken. My chest had been punctured, allowing air to rush into the cavity surrounding my lungs, which would explain why I was gasping for air when the paramedics came.
As doctors in the intensive-care unit described my injuries, I listened from deep inside my drugged stupor. I asked for a pen and paper to keep track, “because,” I said, “we'll probably forget otherwise.”
It was a rare source of amusement for friends who stood around my bed in a state of collective worry. My dad struggled to contain himself in the corner of the room.
Some weeks later the doctor paused at the foot of my hospital bed, eyed me and held out his thumb and forefinger close together. “You came this close to dying,” he said.
In the ensuing weeks I set aside such thoughts of life and death in favour of the ephemera that filled the books and newspapers that littered the room. The mess was a source of wonder and work for the nurses – my nurses, men and women of awe-inspiring strength, stamina and stoicism; the nurses who shifted, lifted, carried and cleaned my emaciated body, who dressed my wounds and brought drugs and water to my fluorescent-lit island.
But they would be complicit in efforts to get me out of bed, too. A rehab regimen was announced long before I was in the mood to move. I had everything I needed beside my bed, and yet I was told it would be a good idea to get up and try dragging myself across the room on a high walker.
