When you think of car crashes, you assume there will be a moment, a millisecond at least, when those involved realise what’s about to happen, even if it’s too late to do anything about it. For me, there was no warning. I was driving home from my local hospital in Mexico City where, as a 23-year-old medical student, I’d been interning.
It was a beautiful afternoon. I was sitting at traffic lights and there wasn’t another moving vehicle anywhere near me. And then, like a bomb going off, the whole world seemed to explode and shatter. My car was crumpled all around me. There was twisted metal, broken glass and smoke everywhere. It was as if someone had flicked a switch and put me in the middle of an apocalypse. The car’s roof was caved in, apart from above my seat.
It’s hard to describe those moments. I was conscious, but had no idea what had happened. It was only much later that things became clear. The traffic lights were under a flyover. The driver of a rubbish truck had been talking on a mobile phone and lost control. The vehicle had smashed through the barriers and crashed down on to my VW.
Inside the wreck, I couldn’t move. I was crumpled over the steering wheel and could only turn my head. Along with the stench of the garbage, I could smell petrol and worried there might be an explosion. I remember thinking, “I want to live. I want to live so much.”
There seemed to be a policeman on the scene instantly, but he couldn’t open my door, because the car was so twisted. He stood at the window, risking his own life, telling me I’d be OK, that they were going to cut me out. He was asking where I’d been, where I was going, what I did. Him being there meant more than you could imagine. While he spoke to me, rescuers were cutting the roof. They eventually had to use a crane to hoist me out.
A body was lying in the road and someone was giving him CPR. They told me it was the truck driver and not to look, but you can’t help it. I later learned that he was already dead. They put me in an ambulance, and took me back to the hospital I’d just left, and it was there the extent of my injuries became clear.
The truck had missed me, but the force of the impact had severed my spinal cord in several places. They rushed me into surgery. No one said I might be paralysed, but I was a medical student: I knew it, anyway. And yet I was calm.
My next memory was waking up 10 days later, and that may have been the worst moment of all. For those first few seconds, I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. Then it came back to me and I remembered I hadn’t been able to move. So, slowly, I tried to move my legs and my body, but there was nothing. I knew then that the surgery hadn’t worked. I was desperate, lying there alone in the dark and knowing I was never going to walk again.
The doctors confirmed it. They said it was a miracle that I was alive, but I was paralysed from the neck down. I could move my head, biceps and some smaller muscles in my arms, but nothing else. I couldn’t move my fingers. I couldn’t even breathe by myself at that point. I’d become dependent on a ventilator. It took me a month working with a therapist to get off it.
Of course I was angry. I asked repeatedly, why me? What had I done to deserve this? But I didn’t want the bitterness to eat me up. I said to myself, “Remember how much you wanted to live when you were in that wreck? Well, you’re alive, make the most of it.” And that has been my attitude ever since.
It was a year before I was able to leave hospital. I had to learn everything all over again. Simple things like going to the toilet, answering a phone, brushing my teeth. I need a 24-hour carer. I was determined to finish medical school. I went back and achieved my doctorate a year later. I’m 28 now and a qualified GP, specialising in psychiatry. Sometimes I think being in a wheelchair can be a positive in this work. Patients can see I’ve been through a lot myself.
• As told to Colin Drury
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