My truck-versus-pedestrian accident was 10.5 weeks ago — almost two and a half months. One of the most difficult aspects of my recovery, aside from the physical injuries themselves, has been holding space for very different, simultaneous thoughts and feelings about what happened and how to move forward.
Category: Health
Postcard from Singapore
A couple of weeks ago, I began 2026 with a work-related trip to Singapore to attend a consular leadership development course called the CLDC—it was my first CLDC and my first time ever in the country. It was also the first time since returning home to Burma from the hospital in Bangkok in December that I had traveled anywhere on my own; it felt not only like an exciting professional opportunity, but also a chance to road-test my healing body.
So Glad You’re OK
I came home to Burma the Friday before Christmas and stepped back into my Rangoon life from the before times. Only I didn’t look the same on the outside, and I didn’t feel the same on the inside either. I had been medically evacuated and hospitalized in Thailand for over a month after being unexpectedly hit by a truck while crossing the street in front of my house. I’d broken my pelvis in three places, along with cracking two ribs, breaking a toe, and suffering a bilateral concussion and extensive road rash.
My traumatic injuries were still healing when I returned, and I was only 50% weight-bearing on my left side. Returning to my house and my work, nothing fit quite the same—it was like trying on someone else’s clothes. I had to contend with other people’s reactions to my visible injuries and the shock of what had happened to me, while sorting out my own feelings and struggling with my new limitations in real time. And as I settled back into post and the external cuts, wounds, and bruises slowly began to fade, I heard one thing over and over again: “I’m so glad you’re OK.”
Ableism and Access: Return to Burma
About 10 days ago I returned home to Burma. I’d spent a month hospitalized in Thailand after being hit by a truck while crossing the street in mid-November.
While I was in the hospital, I wanted nothing more than to come home and “get back to normal.” But the two days I spent in a hotel between my discharge and my return home illustrated how difficult navigating the real world would be as long as I could only bear about 15 kg of weight on my left leg. Most able-bodied people simply never notice the ways in which the world is inaccessible to those who move through it a bit differently.
Release
Four and a half weeks after my accident, I was discharged from the hospital. That was one week ago. After being released, I spent a couple nights in Bangkok on my own, flew back to Burma, and returned to work.
Claustrophobia
My accident—the day I was hit by a truck and my life took a hard right turn—was just over three weeks ago. It feels like a lifetime has passed, yet it’s also difficult to believe I’ve already lost so much time. During a one-year tour, each week makes up 1.9% of the assignment. By that math, I’ve already lost 5.8% of my time in Burma (along with post allowances like danger and hardship pay), and the count keeps climbing because of this accident.
Over the 20 days I’ve now spent hospitalized in Thailand, the overall ordeal has felt a bit like Groundhog Day, even as the details of my daily lived experience have shifted subtly over time.
The Land of Smiles
Taking an international flight in a wheelchair is something I never imagined I’d experience. Yet when I arrived in Bangkok a little over two weeks ago, that’s exactly how I traveled—having not taken a single step except for the small ones over the seam between the breezeway and the plane, the only gap the wheelchair couldn’t bridge.
The morning three days after my truck vs. pedestrian accident, motorpool drove me from our house to the airport. An embassy nurse and my husband accompanied. I was pushed in a wheelchair through check-in, immigration, security, and Rangoon’s mostly-empty international departures terminal. I was the second passenger to board the flight, transferred into the tiny, narrow wheelchair that fits down the plane aisle. I settled into a comfortable business-class seat and never got up during the 70-minute flight. When we landed in Bangkok, an ambulance—and finally, answers about my injuries—waited just beyond baggage claim.
Aftermath
Coming home from the embassy that Sunday morning after my accident ushered in not only new levels of physical pain, but a lingering stretch of complicated, disorienting emotional terrain.
Butterfly Effect
The night I was hit by a truck earlier this month while crossing the street is blurry in places, with some parts missing entirely. I think of the first 48 hours afterward in two distinct phases: the initial hours of confusion, memory loss, and non-linearity; and the remainder marked by pain, overwhelm, regret, and the slow, devastating realization of what had happened.
The day and night of the accident had been completely ordinary. Ordinary, until a second before impact, when I turned my head expecting only traffic coming from the right and instead saw the truck barreling toward me from the left, traveling on the wrong side of the road. Everything after that is blank for maybe half an hour, followed by other gaps and hazy fragments during the three or four hours I spent in the hospital.
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.
Distance Vision, Part III
In early January, I had eye surgery to free myself from glasses and contact lenses. The procedure was called refractive lens exchange, or custom lens replacement (CLR, pronounced like the word “clear”). During CLR, an ophthalmologist removes the natural lens from behind each eye and replaces them with synthetic interocular lenses (IOLs). In my case, like cataract surgery without the cataracts.
IOLs can never develop cataracts and are free of the age-related hardening and clouding that begins in your 40s. This lens hardening causes presbyopia, which means you may need reading glasses, even if you’ve had LASIK in the past to correct astigmatism. CLR restores the eye’s original refractive ability by dealing with all of your vision problems on the back end. Usually, CLR patients no longer need any vision correction.
Although my first CLR corrected most of my astigmatism, it took three further surgeries to bring my vision up to its present point: clear at all distances. I would have been dumbfounded to know back at the beginning that it would ultimately take four procedures to permanently correct my vision. But fortunately it was all covered by the initial price I’d paid and today I have no regrets.
PN250: Core Skills for Mid-Level Officers
Two weeks ago I went “back to school,” attending a weeklong mid-level training focused on strategic decision-making at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). I hadn’t been on campus since March 2020, four months before we ultimately left for my third tour in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. An FSI leadership training had been the last scheduled course I’d managed to attend before Foreign Affairs Counterthreat Training (FACT) was cancelled due to COVID and we went into lockdown in our PCS Lodging apartment.
Four years later, in spring 2024, FSI looks both the same and somehow changed to me. Since I’ve been gone, construction has started – and finished – on the new B Building. The resultant space is modern and light-filled. Flowering trees and daffodils dot the landscape in pinks and yellows. Green grass lawns stretch like taut carpets, connecting the cafeteria to its adjacent counterpart structures and hosting the perfect place for jeans-clad students to read, eat, or throw a frisbee around.
But as I came back to FSI, I couldn’t help but think the bucolic scenery seemingly belied the terrible reality the world – and our workplace – have seen since 2020. However much things have changed and are now attempting to boomerang back, they can’t truly return to what they once were. Not for me. And yet here we are. Like all successful creatures, we adapt and keep going. This trial run going to FSI for a week was as much a test for me of my current logistical and life skills (and how ready I am for a year of a slow roller coaster that builds and builds) as it was the core skills the Department sought to impart through PN250.
Distance Vision, Part II
In January, I wrote about having eye surgery during the first week of the new year to free myself from glasses and contact lenses. The procedure was called refractive lens exchange, or custom lens replacement (CLR, pronounced like the word “clear”).
In CLR, an ophthalmologist removes the natural lens behind the eye and replaces it with a synthetic interocular lens (IOL). The synthetic lens can never develop cataracts and is free of the age-related hardening and opacity a natural lens eventually experiences. CLR restores the eye’s original refractive ability. Therefore, depending on the kind of IOLs inserted – the patient no longer needs vision correction as a result.
Although CLR corrected my astigmatism as promised, it took a second procedure, LASIK, in mid-February to fine-tune the results and try to bring my close-up vision into focus.
Distance Vision
A couple of days into the new year, I had eye surgery in northern Virginia to permanently lessen my dependence on glasses and contacts.
Refractive lens exchange – – sometimes called custom lens replacement, clear lens replacement, or CLR (pronounced like “clear”) – – is an outpatient surgery that replaces the natural lens of your eye with an artificial interocular lens. Patients undergo in-depth testing and receive lenses tailored to their individual needs. The procedure stabilizes your vision, prevents you from developing cataracts in the future, and is supposed to correct for near-sightedness, far-sightedness, astigmatism, and reading prescriptions.
The jury’s still out on my up-close vision as my eyes heal and the swelling reduces, but so far my view to the horizon has been sharper than ever.
Gone From My Sight, Part II
[This is a companion piece to a post I wrote in August 2023.]
The second week of October, I arrived in Washington state to help my dad take care of my stepmom L in what I now know was her final six weeks of hospice. She was battling pancreatic cancer – one of the scariest and most intimidating illnesses imaginable.
I don’t think of her as having lost a battle with cancer, but sadly, she did die in mid-November. In the weeks leading up to her death, I was forced to confront my own previous assumptions about the home as proxy for a ‘good’ death and my shock about how much of hospice care in the United States falls directly to a patient’s family.
Collecting Postcards 