Road Accident After Effects

This piece isn’t funny, so if you are looking for a sting in the tale at the end of it, just pass on by.

The last time I had a melt down caused by PTSD was about eleven years ago. I’ve had small flips now and again, but nothing like the one I’m about to recount.

I was driving back home from Manchester late one afternoon, the rush hour was just about starting. Traffic was fairly heavy on the main road out of the city, nose to tail but moving, and the weather was dull, cloudy and miserable. I’d been to see a consultant rheumatologist for constant pains in muscles and joints which I had been suffering for several months. My GP refused to refer me to a consultant as I had recently been diagnosed with cancer, so my dear sister paid for me to see one privately.

We were approaching a set of traffic lights on red. Traffic going in both directions on the main road had stopped and was waiting for the cross traffic to clear and the lights to change to green to get going once more. Suddenly I heard the sound of an emergency vehicle, it’s sirens blasting away. I looked forward to the junction and watched as a Police car followed by an Ambulance came through the junction on the wrong side of the road. Headlights on, blue lights flashing and sirens whooping and screaming. The two vehicles slowed as they came through the lights when the cross traffic had stopped and then accelerated hard down the road towards us quickly regaining their correct side of the road. The whole incident lasted no more than ten seconds.

As they came past us I felt myself welling up inside and gripped the steering wheel hard, and burst into tears. Traffic started to move and I drove off, still holding the wheel for all I was worth, and pulled into a side street and stopped.

For a few minutes I sat there, my heart racing, my breath coming in hard gulps and tears flowing down my cheeks. Finally I settled myself down and carried on with my journey.

Later that evening at home I re-played in my mind the incident and the memory which had triggered it.

I was riding a Police motorcycle as escort to an ambulance carrying a twelve year old girl. She had been eating her evening meal sat on the floor in front of the television when her parents came into the room and found her collapsed. She suffered from epilepsy and had started to choke on the food. By the time her parents found some minutes later her she was lying on her side shaking and vomiting. They had called the ambulance and police. I turned up, and she was taken to hospital.

Except it wasn’t true.

It was a combination of the memories of two incidents separated by several years, and my mind had combined them into one fearful incident at the traffic lights.

I was quite shocked to realise what had happened in my own mind, it was so convincing at the time.

The part about the girl was true. I was 21 at the time and had been sent to the house where the ambulance was attending the twelve year old girl. Her parents were hardly concerned. It was obvious the girl was in a very bad state. The ambulance driver asked me to ride in the back with the girl to help steady her as his colleague worked on trying to resuscitate the lass. It was a hair raising ride to the children's hospital about five miles away. I remember looking down at her as she gradually went into a foetal position and became increasingly silent. When we arrived at the emergency door to the hospital I hopped out of the back and helped wheel her into the hospital. She died later that night.

The other incident was a few years later when I was riding Police motorcycles. My colleague Jim and I were tasked with escorting an ambulance from the local hospital to a major hospital in Manchester. We flew along the road, leap frogging from one set of traffic lights to the next, overtaking first the ambulance then Jim on his bike to get to the next set of lights. Speeds were ridiculous. It was a scary ride.

Somehow my mind had combined the two memories at the traffic lights in Manchester and produced the melt down.

Strange what your brain will do to you, isn’t it?