The time I was hit by a car. And how ADHD affected my recovery
In early September 2010 I was a bony 19 year old. I identified entirely by my ability to play the guitar and I had long diagnosed and medicated but little understood ADHD. One rainy evening, in an effort to hide the fact I had started smoking from my family, I went on a walk around the streets by our house. I was brutally knocked down by a speeding, spinning, silver Renault Clio. It hit me on the pavement at roughly 40mph so the police said, apparently working it out from where I ended up wrapped around an iron gate. On my way I took out a hedge and a knee-high drystone wall. Needless to say that put paid to my evening plans.
This is my first foray into writing about this event which so shaped me. I hope you’ll forgive a little indulgent jabbering about it.
Lying there, slipping into and out of consciousness and bleeding heavily, I heard the police mention a “probable fatality” and I realised that was me. “There is something I’m supposed to do here” I blearily reminded myself and snatched a quick prayer. I was still religious at the time. I remember the rain on my face and how cool and refreshing it was. I remember how sad I was when someone covered me and I could no longer feel the spatter proving I was alive though I shivered for it. I remember the nightmares as, close to death, the gravity of my situation invaded my unconscious dreams, replaying the same computer game I had been playing all evening. Unable to win. Losing, painfully again and again. I remember the first attempt to lift me ceased when the ambulance crew’s painkillers proved insufficient for the task at hand and with a scream I was put down again. Until someone else joined us with some truly knockout stuff.
I dimly recall blue lights and the feeling of motion underneath. It gets a little bleary after that. Hard to tell the order things happened in. I remember waking with a standard neck brace on, attacked by a wave of nausea caused by painkillers. Unable to turn or roll I vomited messily over my face and neck, bringing up mum’s risotto. I remember drunkenly asking my parents to please move whatever it was that was stuck under my leg. It turns out it was my jeans and they were actually stuck in my leg. Both my parents worked in hospital. Dad was an orthopaedic surgeon, mum a cardiac nurse so they handled seeing me incredibly well, I thought. I told my dad I couldn’t move my toes. He smiled, looked down and said “no, I’d be surprised.” So 3 or 4 days passed in a haze of drug induced mistiness and, despite that, pain. I was in the high dependency unit, drinking from sponges on sticks, never quite able to get enough water and feeling rude to keep asking for another one. When I slept I had bad dreams as my mind rationalised my pain with dream logic. (In one, I got into a fight with a pirate, and he cut my legs off with his cutlass.)
The injuries were spectacular, but mostly contained to below my knees. I had open fractures in the Tibia and Fibular of both legs, a shattered ankle and assorted holes left in the soft tissue all around. The rest of my body was merely very badly bruised, particularly my forearms, which suggests I had thought to raise my hands when the thing came hurtling at me. I don’t really remember.
This is where ADHD enters the story, but if I’m honest only barely. They moved me out of the HDU and onto a regular ward, once I was able to eat and drink for myself. Because now begins the true challenge. The weeks of sitting in a room doing nothing, unable to even get out of bed, unable to sleep. My last blogpost described boredom and ADHD. This was a world of boredom; boredom and pain. I started living for the little blip sound which meant I was receiving another dose of diamorphine. Though never quite enough. It wasn’t my legs that were painful, it was the tube running into my back which I was lying on. I couldn’t roll because of my legs, so it just stayed there. An interminable pressure, draining the wound left where they cut out half of my latissimus dorsi to patch my leg.
My parents brought me my guitar, which was to be my salvation, but for the bruising on my forearms I couldn’t play it. That was a very big deal for me because as a teenager I had decided the guitar was central to my existence in the way that only teenagers can decide something like that. I was given my I-pod. For the younger readers that is an archaic piece of technology which allowed people to listen to music from their pockets. For some reason, though I tried to listen to many random artists, I always ended up settling on one album. It was Masterpiece Theatre by Mariana’s Trench. Pop punky stuff that I’d never really been interested in all that much before, now it was everything. All day every day and every night that album blasted at maximum volume directly into my eardrums and I looked out the window.
I always find it fascinating how humans tend to attach themselves to innocuous pieces of music during trying times. It was always my argument, as a songwriter, for vague lyrics because you never know what the listener will be going through. I digress.
Five days went by after being moved from the HDU and in all that time I did not sleep. It was a combination of inactivity, medication, the music in my ears, my unwillingness to submit to more nightmares, the forced withdrawal from cigarettes, pain and shock. I don’t know if you’ve ever stayed awake for 120 hours straight but I don’t advise it. I started to hallucinate one night. I convinced myself that bad men with guns had invaded the hospital looking for drugs. That they were systematically moving between the beds and murdering the patients. I stayed deathly quiet, barely breathing for hours out of fear they would find me and kill me. I felt so powerless. I suppressed every tiniest noise. Out of the window the street light became a police cordon in my mind. I saw my family there and I came to terms with my death. I thought how much I loved them all and how lucky I was to have lived with them.
This is the darkest moment. I hallucinated that the police told me the terrorists had planted a bomb and if I didn’t get out now I was sure to die. So I acted. I swung my legs out of bed and stood, supported by the temporary external fixators holding my shattered bones in place. I stumbled in agony to the window and punched as hard as I could. It wasn’t hard enough, I was hardly at my strongest then. My first two punches couldn’t penetrate the triple glazing and I started to panic and shout. That was when a nurse who I was certain had been killed came to me and in shock I began to realise what had happened, and how close I had come to jumping from a third story window.
I spent the next whole day still not sleeping. Hallucinating, not trusting anyone and myself. Completely disconnected from reality. That night they gave me some sleeping meds and I finally got to sleep, and had my first good dream.
I’ve told this particular bit of the story many times in an effort to make people understand that for me this episode was actually more traumatic than the car crash itself, though I suppose it’s all the same thing. Once I could sleep I was only bored (and in pain but that’s a given), and even though I had nothing to do I insisted after that point that I be given my methylphenidate (ADHD drugs). It had always made me feel safe and here in hospital it did the same thing, though I had nothing to concentrate on it did at least make me feel in control. Though I didn’t start properly trusting my own mind again for many weeks thereafter.
Luckily for me, as I’ve said, my parents both worked in hospitals. This means, I’m sorry to say, I benefitted from a bit of nepotism. I had excellent surgeons and my operations happened sooner than they do for many people moving through the gloriously free healthcare system that is the NHS. I won’t hear a bad word about it. If I were paying for healthcare, the bill would have been bankruptingly large. So large they would have found it easier to simply take my legs. I’m digressing again.
After a month of sheerest boredom I escaped. Legs caged in Ilizarov frames and still on quite a variety of painkillers I finally got to go home. I left hell. It took me just under a year to make a full recovery and in that time I started going out with Sally, who is now my wife and one of the driving forces behind this Adult ADHD project. We had met in school, but it’s strange to think that we wouldn’t have seen each other again had she not contacted me when she heard about the car crash. I also attained 100% completion of the game Red Dead Redemption which, though I was in the process of losing my faith at this point, was a godsend. I spent many evenings with my siblings and my friends getting quite drunk and laughing. With the money I received for all the inconvenience I started my band The Red Levels and I recorded my album: Mindfield Mind. It was filled with songs written with lyrical vaguery as a driving motif though there is at least one about ADHD in there.
I admit it wasn’t the way I’d have liked to lose that youthful happy-go-lucky late-teenage innocence that so many get to gradually grow out of. It was a very jarring influx of reality on my sheltered life. I came to terms with my mortality. Or rather with the truth that one can’t really ever come to terms with mortality. I stopped listening to religious ideas because I have far more time for things that can be proved. I learned to respect sleep. I drive carefully. I LOVE the NHS. Since my legs were miraculously repaired, I’ve put them through some heavy use and I have some very cool scars.
If I’m honest with you this blogpost wasn’t really about my ADHD so much as it was about a horribly traumatic thing that happened to me. You’ve probably figured that out by now. But it is cathartic to put what I’ve spoken of many times into one cohesive written article. It is indulgent. But I’m happy with it.
I have a photo gallery of my recovery and of the injury itself but I must warn you now that these photos are VERY graphic. If you are the sort to go queasy at the sight of blood then DO NOT ENTER this link: https://imgur.com/a/IxxLhus Fair warning they are decidedly unsafe for work.
