Wrong Lane

After more than six weeks of the longest government shutdown in history, things were finally starting to brighten up towards mid-November. After a sudden medevac to Bangkok, my husband V had successful gallbladder removal surgery and returned home to Rangoon. The U.S. government reopened and federal employees received our three missing paychecks in quick succession. The bid season relaunched, sparking renewed excitement about our potential next tour. V and I spent a day off together in observance of a Burmese holiday—swimming in our favorite local pool, then enjoying a quiet evening at home relaxing with our cat. All seemed to be getting back to normal.

Then, the following Saturday night, we had one of the worst nights of our lives—sudden, unexpected, and completely out of the blue. It was the kind of night that shifts your reality, stripping away any illusion that you are in control and leaving you in a world so different from the one you knew just moments before that the surreality comes in continual waves of disbelief.

Moments when life changes in an instant are always preceded by mundanity. There is nothing about the day to signal that something monumental is on the way. In retrospect, you replay every little thing you did beforehand a hundred times, looking for the clue, the flaw, the point where you could have acted differently—as if placing yourself and your decisions at the center of control could somehow let you go back and alter the trajectory. But no matter how you reimagine things, it seems every moment was inevitably going to lead you where you ended up.

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On a Saturday at about a quarter to six o’clock, I walked down the stairs in our residence from the second floor to the first with my handbag, looking for my phones and keys. I was hungry and somewhat cranky. I’d started the day by doing laundry and going for a solid workout in the embassy gym. But later in the day I’d napped and lost my momentum. I’d had a long week (month? year?) at work and then had spent hours in the sun the day before. The nap was warranted.

V and I had discussed a new-to-us Chinese restaurant we might try out for a late lunch or early dinner, followed by an outdoor lake walk. But now it was getting dark, and it wouldn’t have made sense to ride all the way to that location without being able to do both the meal and the scenic walk.

V appeared in the front entryway to help recalibrate our plans as I was trying to figure out whether to carry the whole embassy duty officer backpack, or just take out the notebook, pen, and phone, and stuff them in my handbag. I settled on the latter as V inquired, Should we just go to x?

He was considering a restaurant we frequented down the street from our house on the same side of the road. As I eyed the duty backpack again, hesitating, it occurred to me that any U.S. citizen emergencies in-country I likely was already well aware of.

I scowled, turning back to his question. It’s Saturday. We go to x all the time. We went there two nights ago. Let’s go to y.

He nodded, confirmed the Grab taxi (the Asian version of Uber) on his phone, and we headed out the door. I fumbled with the keys. He gently took them from me, locked the door, and handed them back. I slipped them into an outer pocket of my vintage leather purse.

We paused for a moment in the front yard to admire the solar fountain he had recently installed. The sunlight stored during the day powered a lively little stream of water I’d seen a yellow butterfly dancing around earlier. Now that dusk had fallen, the water was illuminated by small multicolored lights.

On the way towards our front gate, we said hello to the local guard in his booth. He smiled and stepped out to greet us. He rolled open the sliding gate and we headed outside the property walls with a wave back to him.

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We paused in our driveway, noting the traffic pattern. We lived one property from the corner of a busy four-way intersection. The two curb lanes to us traveling westbound—from left to right in front of our house—were backed up at the intersection’s red light. The two eastbound lanes on the opposite side of the street were mostly empty, those cars having just passed through.

V held up his phone, showing me the license plate of our confirmed Grab. He noted it would be coming from the opposite direction, pulling up on the other side of the street from us.

Typical. We would need to cross all four lanes to avoid the Grab driver ditching us once he realized he’d have to make an unprotected left across two oncoming busy lanes to collect us. If he was willing, he’d probably get stuck in our driveway with no way to back out against the never-ending traffic. Even if he could get out of our driveway, he’d have to then merge all the way over to make an immediate left.

It was a stupid place near a busy intersection to call a Grab to pick you up at most times of day. Yet, Grab was the way everyone got around in the city and there was no shortage of poor road infrastructure or aggravating navigation. It didn’t feel dangerous to cross the street because it happened so often. What adult cannot safely cross a street, I would have said. Eventually, there would always be enough of a break in the cars. So, we made it work.

I remember a brief exchange in which V suggested we wait, and I said we should go. Most of the time, I’m the one who prefers to wait until the Grab has already pulled up before making my way to it—something that could be stressful, with the driver waiting and the app pinging with warnings about late fees. And for once, I wanted to be ready on the correct side before the taxi arrived, having finally grasped the pickup spot would always be directly across from our house, no matter how clearly we put our address in the app.

I knew the westbound lanes would soon get a green light, and I stepped off the curb first, seeing a small window to cross while the cars closet to us were still halted. We crossed directly through the stopped cars to the middle. There was no median. V was slightly behind me and to my right, probably because I went around the back of a car and he went around the front. I checked to the right. Two lanes of cars were on the way, either coming straight or rounding through the intersection, I can’t remember now, but still a ways off. We had timed it right, for the umpteenth time. As I stepped forward I glanced left. For a split second, I saw something I couldn’t comprehend.

A truck was coming that shouldn’t have been, driving on the wrong side of the road, and making westbound traffic three lanes wide instead of two. It had one of those flat fronts and no protruding hood, with a tall, square windshield sitting directly above the grill. And it was traveling westbound in the eastbound lane.

I could hear the driver had his foot pressed on the gas. He had pulled out from behind the two lanes of stopped cars and moved into oncoming traffic, using the still-empty lane to his advantage. If he could pass the cars waiting to go straight and position himself for a left turn, he just might make the light.

From the time I looked left to the moment of impact approximately one second elapsed. In that time, I saw the truck barreling down on me with almost cartoonish, horrifying speed. The front of it almost appeared to be bouncing. There wasn’t time to step back, run, or even open my mouth to scream.

I mercifully don’t remember when the truck impacted my body simultaneously from head to hip. I don’t remember the force shattering his windshield, cracking two of my ribs, and fracturing my pelvis in three different locations.

I don’t remember the truck’s metal grill raking down my left arm leaving tracks like barbed wire.

I don’t remember putting my hands up, but the wounds on my inner wrists suggest I did.

I don’t remember the sensation of flying through the air and slamming the right side of my forehead onto the pavement, but V saw it, right before my eyes rolled back to their whites and I started making snorting noises, consistent with concussion.

I don’t remember my fingers and knuckles and elbows and knees scraping roughly across the pavement, picking up gravel.

I don’t remember my right big toe fracturing, a shard of bone fragment breaking free inside, or rocks embedding themselves into my gel pedicure, or the knees of my jeans tearing out.

I don’t remember how my jeweled sandals, strapped on, were knocked from my feet and my water bottle went flying, the plastic lid ring popping out of shape.

I don’t remember how I got two black eyes, a bleeding wound at my left temple, and a knot on my forehead the size of a tennis ball.

I don’t remember any of it, because I didn’t experience it firsthand.

Doctors say trauma-related amnesia from concussion and shock isn’t repressed memory, it’s non-formation of memory. There is no memory to retrieve because the brain never recorded it. The prefrontal cortex shuts down, and a knock to the head disrupts the hippocampus which controls memory formation.

But I did feel every bit of the pain when I woke up—confused, nauseous, and in excruciating discomfort. My awareness began as a tiny speck, underneath, a tidal wave of motion sickness and profound vertigo. I could hear voices all around me sounding tense, but I couldn’t really see anyone.

Time was fuzzy. One second I glimpsed the truck. The next second, I was in an ambulance. But perhaps 30 or 40 minutes actually elapsed in the interim. I couldn’t connect the dots. How was I the last to know? the absurd thought came to me, but all I could say was, “I’m so dizzy, I’m so dizzy.”

I asked what had happened, and even after being told, You had a little accident, you were hit by a truck, I kept asking again, unable to retain or process the answer.

And that moment marked the beginning of the “after”—the point at which being hit by a truck entered my narrative arc. From that moment on, it became part of my reality, whether I wanted it there or not, whether it fit into my understanding of the world or seemed entirely senseless.

The high-impact energy forced to pass directly through my body as a pedestrian without my consent invaded my sense of certainty and my assumptions about what my tour in Rangoon would or wouldn’t be about. It demanded I integrate the event into my life, my memory, and my identity, before I’d even dealt with my initial shock and disbelief.

And in practical terms, the accident immediately changed everything about my daily life and mobility. As I soon would learn, it would also necessitate my departure from Rangoon for a time.

To be continued…

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