White. It’s all white. Everywhere I looked was white. Sounds of muffled voices. Then I focused on a detail that sprang out of the sea of white — the word Toilet in big red letters indicating the way to the restroom.
I tried to rub my face, but I couldn’t make my arms move. They were Velcroed to my white bed. I seemed to have a tube up every orifice — one up my nose and a couple of tubes down below. I was stuck there, staring at the word Toilet in large red letters.
My reality was very hazy, like those first couple of seconds when you wake up from a very, very deep sleep and your surroundings start to take shape. The first thought that came to my head was that I wanted to go to the toilet. My mind struggled to make sense of everything. I kind of understood that I was catheterised, but at the same time, I didn’t — not really. Despite knowing I didn’t need to urinate, I still wanted to go to the toilet. And pee standing up. That marked the start of my recovery — making sense of my new world.
Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be in a coma? If you’ve read my story called “The Lights Are On, but Nobody’s at Home”, it might give you an idea of the challenges I faced. Some were pretty shocking, some had a funny side, and others were just plain arduous. But let’s start from the beginning — my first encounter with brain damage.
My life began with a bang. At the age of three, I was run over by my dad. I was wandering aimlessly behind his car when he got in and reversed over me. This seemed to set a precedent for my life. I seem to have blundered from accident to injury with surprising regularity. It’s not that I’m careless; sometimes, the stars just seem to line up like that.
My dad rushed me to the hospital, breaking the sound barrier to get me there in record time. The surgeon informed him that there was only an even chance I would survive. I had some form of haematoma compressing my brain, so they had to relieve the pressure. This, I believe, involved making a hole in my skull to let the blood out. I can still feel the bump on top of my head.
I’ve had a surprising number of accidents, though not all of them were painful or caused me harm. At one point, I was a competitive pilot in the sport of paragliding. It was the early days of the sport, and to some extent, we were all test pilots — especially me, a rather hapless one at that.
We were always pushing the envelope for performance. To reduce drag, we decreased the diameter of the suspension lines, making them weaker. I learned this the hard way during a competition — specifically, the Pre-Worlds at Saint-André-les-Alpes in the southern Alps of France.
During one task, I was flying in a sketchy area when, all of a sudden, most of the suspension lines on one side snapped because they were too weak. I tumbled a thousand feet into a friendly tree and emerged completely uninjured. That’s right — the tree saved my life.
My life is divided into two parts: flying heavier-than-air gliding machines like hang gliders and paragliders, and everything else — life, the universe, love, death, and a new status quo.