To give you some kind of perspective on this situation, one evening, my parents received a phone call from a police officer informing them that their son had been in a car accident and they would need to get ready to be picked up as soon as possible. Within a short amount of time, a police car pulled up outside the house. Once inside the car, my Dad asked the officer how serious it was. The officer—my Dad remembers him being a very tall, somber man—replied it was potentially fatal.
The first hospital they were taken to was where my friend and I had our initial assessments. My friend’s parents had also been picked up and both families stayed in hospital overnight whilst the medical team assessed the seriousness of our injuries.
In the early hours of the following morning, the decision was made to whisk me off to a specialist ward a further forty-five miles away whilst my parents were escorted closely behind in the police vehicle having spent the preceding few hours wearing out the carpet in the hospital’s waiting room. My friend’s injuries were deemed too severe and his life support machine was switched off some hours later.
The journey to the hospital must have been a mismatch of external silence and internal noise. The terror of not knowing what they would find combined with the awareness that they, as parents, needed to honour their vulnerable elements whilst having been thrust into a completely novel situation that their adult selves needed to stay stoic for. Their internal family systems must have been going haywire.
Mum would spend every day during that first six weeks doing the one hundred and eighty-mile round trip, not knowing if her son would survive, and if he did, how this would present itself. She carried the turmoil of not knowing whether she would ever have the chance to inform me of what had happened and carried the overwhelming anxiety of having to run over and over in her mind how she would approach this if the opportunity ever presented itself. All this on top of doing—as far as was humanly possible—everyday Mum things. She truly is an amazing human being.
Dad returned to work after the initial week as the external world hadn’t stopped turning for us and our circumstances. He would attend most evenings and weekends, but without an income, there would have been another problem for them both to deal with.
As someone who, I have since suspected, was carrying a wealth of his own unexamined relational traumas, he, like many other men of his generation, and many of us still to this day, appeared to have developed a defense mechanism that presented itself as the inability to turn his attention inwards.
This would have likely to have been an outdated response to having to deal with treatment from his developmental years, either being unable, or actively reaching for anything in his toolbox to avoid, having to sit with uncomfortable emotions in order to protect himself from the possibility of perceived criticism.
My younger brother was in his final years of schooling at the time so how he found the maturity to deal with such a situation is entirely beyond me. My Nan and Granddad, sister, and her family would also visit regularly and I was also visited by one or two close friends at this time.
After the initial six weeks, I was taken off the critical list and transferred back to the hospital where I had my initial assessment. When I wasn’t unconscious my eyes would occasionally open but “I” wasn’t behind them. Mum would continue doing the eighty-mile round trip every day, sometimes twice a day, for three months whilst my Dad and brother continued fitting their visits in and around work and school life.
The entire family was in the throes of immersing themselves in the world of head injury with any free time they had in between work, life, sleep, and racing up and down the motorway. When they had the capacity, they read books (one of which—a guidebook published by Headway—became their “Bible”), got in touch with charities, spoke with friends and medical professionals, and, to varying degrees, did their own soul-searching.
Both Mum and Dad had been prepared for the overwhelming possibility their son may be unable to walk, talk, or even recognise them again so Mum was overjoyed when I burst into tears upon noticing her standing at the foot of my bed one day.
Only a week or two prior to this, whilst on life support, I remember looking down on my body and feeling as if “I” existed both everywhere and nowhere at the same time...