Today marks the 17th-anniversary of an experience that I had, which I credit as an enormous pivot point in my life. On that fateful day, 17 long years ago, I was lucky enough to have a life-changing experience. An experience which, at the time, didn’t feel like the blessing it became, but today, with the benefit of hindsight, I now look upon it as the day that really sparked my journey to where I am in my life right now.
I recognise that this is true for each of us, woven into the fabric of our everyday lives. Every single day contributes to shaping who we are at this very moment, making our journey uniquely ours.
But every now and then we get to experience something different. We all have stand out experiences and this is one of the top two stand out days during my 44 years on planet earth. I suppose you could call it the first significant chapter in my story.
So what happened? What experience could have been so positive, so life changing that I would still be drawing from it 17years later? Well you may be surprised, it’s not what you may think.
The 22nd February 2007 had began as just a normal Thursday. The only thing I had in my diary was a normal days work in the office of my busy family recruitment business and my car was booked in for a service.
I was living in Portsmouth at the time, and my best friend Peter was booked to do the work on my car, he was the only person I trusted so before work I drove my car to him on Hayling Island, a short 20minute drive along the a27. I then went and did my days work, an uneventful yet extremely busy day collating a preparing the weeks contractor payroll.
My mum also lived on Hayling and as such I planned to kill two birds with one stone and have dinner with her prior to collecting my car. After dinner I made my way to Peter’s lock up to collect my car. Everything was fine however Peter had noticed a bulge on the inside of my rear tyre, as if I had clipped a curb and advised me to sort it as a matter of urgency. It was still safe to drive but I had to promise to take extra special care on the 8 mile journey home and book it in to be sorted the following morning.
On the journey home, I did just that. I kept ‘blue steel’ as she was affectionately known, firmly in the slow lane, chugging along at 60-70mph and made my way safely back to Portsmouth.
As with most UK Cities, as you enter Portsmouth, you come to a number of roundabouts, the first of which I entered and exited without any issue. Unfortunately as I approached the second of these roundabouts, I could see a vehicle in my rear view mirror approaching at a very high speed. I could see they were going to undertake me, which normally wouldn’t have been an issue however they decided to do this half way around the round about completely cutting me off as they exited.
This caused me to brake and swerve and as I exited the round about it had become very clear to me that I had lost control of my car. As I fought to regain control, everything went into slow motion. I somehow managed to avoid hitting the other vehicle and more importantly the solid concrete central reservation but this just made matters worse, as the vehicle slid completely out of control, left the road, only to collide, driver side on with a highway signage post. You know, one of the big ones.
Unfortunately, as my car folded around the post, it collided directly with me. First, striking me on the right side of my hip, ironically smashing the left side of my pelvis into 3 pieces. It wasn’t done with me yet. As the post tore through the car it struck the right side of my rib cage breaking all but 2 of them in the process.
Although, I am not proud of the next admission and I don’t want to suggest that anyone else does this, it did potentially save my life. I was not wearing my seat belt. As a result the force of the accident threw me toward the passenger side of the car. The reason this potentially saved my life, was confirmed by the ambulance service and fire brigade. The post had impacted the car with such force that had I been fastened into my seat, the post would likely have struck my head and perhaps this story would never have been written. Every cloud as they say.
As soon as I recovered a modicum of composure, I tried to get out of the car as quickly as I could. I had watched far too many movies and, delusional thoughts of it exploding genuinely went through my puzzled mind.
Such was the damage, I had to make my escape through the passenger side. Due to the impact with my ribs, I was completely winded. My lungs were empty and I could not breathe. To make matters worse, the impact from the airbag had led to me to bite deep into my tongue. I did not know this at the time due to the Adrenalin, so when I saw blood pouring out of my mouth, and added this to my inability to breathe, my first thought was that I had punctured my lung.
As I made my way out of the wreckage, although not religious, I do remember saying a little prayer apologising to my mum, I really thought she was going to have to bury another child, her first being lost to sudden infant death syndrome back in the early 1970’s.
Once out of the car, still completely unaware of the extent of my injuries I attempted to stand up and walk to the roadside to flag someone down but, my legs would not work. When I attempted to take a step my legs would overlap each other and I just kept falling. I ended up having to drag myself on my belly, commando style, a good 10-15meters to the side of the road. At this stage the adrenaline was evidently still high. I had no real pain anywhere, I was just struggling to get air into my lungs, literally suffocating and what the bloody hell had I done to my legs, why wouldn’t they work. Was my back broken?
I had so many worries and questions flying through my confused and traumatised mind. I attempted to flag passing traffic from the ground for what seemed like a lifetime. Eventually a lorry driver saw me and came to my aid. He called an ambulance and my brother.
My experience wasn’t over. An ambulance arrived but the police would not let me leave until they had checked the CCTV footage. If it was dangerous driving they wanted to read me my rights at the scene. Once the police were satisfied that it was just an accident and the other driver became of more interest we were eventually cleared to make our way to Queen Alexandra hospital where my bad fortune continued. I arrived at the hospital as the ambulance shifts were changing. I laid there in arrivals, unknowingly, with a shirt full of broken glass, for nearly 4 hours. Eventually, my brother whom had come to the hospital with me, asked (for the 10th time) when I could expect to be seen only to find out I hadn’t even been checked in. As soon as he mentioned RTA red lights were switched on and I was rushed in to an emergency ward.
While my experience was pretty insane, I still wasn’t experiencing too much in the way of pain and if truth be told at this point I thought it was all a little overly dramatic. All I was worried about was my poor car and I was still expecting to be home the next day. I had a number of scans, X-rays and examinations but no one was really telling me anything.
Eventually at around 7am the following morning a nurse entered my room with a rope and some weights? I was so confused. I asked if I would be going home that day and she told me the Doctor would go through it with me when he did his rounds.
When the Doctor finally came, he informed me that I was lucky to be alive and that I had broken my pelvis and as such I would not be going home………for up to 3 months. WTAF!! He also explained that due to the way it had broken it was not a certainty that I would make a full recovery. IE I may not walk the same again? I couldn’t really take in what he was saying, mostly because I didn’t really understand my injury and, surely if it was that serious, why wasn’t the pain reflecting this? I asked him to explain it again.
He told me to imagine a healthy pelvis being an open book, he then told me to imagine that book being slammed shut, well that’s my broken pelvis. To open my ‘book’ back up, they had to put me in traction and I had to remain as still as possible for up to 3months. For anyone that does no know what traction is, it’s when you have weights attached to ropes, which are tied to your ankles and upper legs in an attempt to open the pelvis up and hold it in position.
When you break a hip or pelvis you are put in the same ward as those with similar injuries. Due to the type of injury, naturally this includes a lot of elderly people that have suffered falls, many with dementia and general confusion and as a result sleep is near on impossible. It’s really not a great place to even attempt a recovery.
Around 3 weeks into my hospital stay my friend Simon came to see me. He could see that I was clearly struggling. By this point I was close to losing my mind, I had begun to feel like a character from one flew over the cuckoos nest so he told me he was going to come back with a ‘gift’ the following day. That gift was a large container full of cannabis brownies.
I ate my first brownie on Saturday evening, I remember this because match of the day was on as it kicked in. Why is this relevant I hear you all ask. Well since being checked in to the hospital I had abstained from taking any pain medication due to the known side effects. Trust me when I say you do not want to be constipated with a broken pelvis and even back then, addiction to opioids was no laughing matter.
Obviously, abstaining from the pain medication was pretty uncomfortable at times but at least I could feel what movements to avoid to ensure I could make a full recovery. I was only 27 years old and I really wanted to walk again, unimpeded.
As soon as the brownie kicked in, the pain I was experiencing noticeably melted away and it lasted for hours. I continued to self medicate for the remainder of my hospital stay even working out the perfect dose for pain and the perfect dose for sleep. However, as successful as this approach had been while confined to a hospital bed, it wasn’t really a genuine option to practice while working 12-14 hours a day in the busy world of recruitment. I was going to have to find an alternative approach.
So this is a great story, but why is this relevant, and how did it change my life?
The first point is, this is the day that I got interested in my body and how I could adopt natural lifestyle changes in an attempt to benefit its health and its longevity. Up to this point I had not even given my mortality a second thought, I was going to live forever. Now, faced with dealing with the after effects of such a grave injury, that simply had to change.
The next point is, this was also the day that I was first exposed to the way in which natural health modalities such as cannabis, breathwork and plant medicine, while backed by thousands of years of anecdotal evidence as well as some very well hidden science, had been ridiculed. I read the official story of the formation of the modern pharmaceutical industry and began to see some of the genuine conspiracies in black and white. Documented, verified and reverified in the very medical research that we are still being told does not exist.
However, the experience that I am writing about in this article, was so much bigger. It was a complete change in the way that I saw and experienced everything. I don’t know, maybe it was my life flashing right before my eyes, maybe it was the initial conviction I’d had that my time had come? Whatever it was immediately after my accident, I started to perceive everything very differently. I began to question a lot of things that I had previously just accepted or ignored.
I began to get more interested and vocal talking about politics. I didn’t follow any party, quite the opposite, I began to see through the facade, it was all theatre that I believed was there to divide us and I felt that this needed to change.
I was confused that so many people, myself included had been hoodwinked into believing that their only option in life was to work 50 hours plus per week in a job that they hated and still there would be injustice and poverty and struggle everywhere you looked. Nothing felt right.
I began to see evidence of mass manipulation. People in my social circles and work colleagues would be complaining about benefits cheats, or racial divisions whenever there were programs on the telly about it and this link had become very evident with my new outlook on life. They would often even fall out with one another defending their chosen political party. Again, something which I have no doubt happened before my accident I just didn’t notice it. Now it seemed so obvious and it pressed a button.
While I was extremely successful in recruitment, if truth be told, I had fallen into it. I always knew it was at odds with my energy, I found it a bit of a jobsworthy industry and deep down, I hated the sales environment but like so many people, I was extremely accustomed to the financial benefits it had afforded me so I chose to ignore the obvious imbalance it created in exchange for chasing the ever moving carrot.
I was still measuring success by the bachelor pad, the gadgets and the BMW. So much so that even after my accident when I realised all of this, it would still be another 8-9 years before I was brave enough to take real life changing action, but this was definitely the time that the seed was planted.
Even the way that I experienced movies changed. Before my accident I would happily lay on the sofa with a Sunday hangover and watch movies all day I loved them. After my accident however, I kept seeing signs of programming and manipulation and I just couldn’t shake the image of actors in a film studio acting the part of someone else, it all became very tropic thunder.
Ironically, it is actually a film that I use to explain just how much my mind had changed. That is the movie ‘A Buggs Life’ Oscar winning stuff I know.
I was at my mums house, still recovering from breaking my pelvis. My niece who was 1.5 years old at the time came round to spend the day and we sat down to watch the aforementioned ‘A Buggs Life’.
There is a scene in the movie where the grasshoppers, whom were forcing the ants to harvest food for them, have a conversation in a bar, I’ll paraphrase. They basically say ‘could you imagine if the ants woke up to their strength in numbers, our free ride would soon come to an end’.
I couldn’t help but see the direct correlation with our own world, only the grass hoppers were politicians, bureaucrats and elite billionaires.
I immediately thought about every time that a friend and I had ventured into discussing politics only for us to reach the same tired stalemate as they used their “get-out-of-jail-free card”. and that is the line, ‘Yeah I agree with you, but what can we do about it, we’re just two people’.
Now, I am sure there are many of you reading, that are just assuming I am now a mad conspiracy theorist (I’m not, i’m a sensible conspiracy theorist lol) and others are still waiting for me to explain why this day is one of the best days of my life? It was a terrible accident, and one that seems to have created a lot of mental anguish.
Whereas before I was a successful recruitment consultant earning nearly 200k per year just going through the motions, ignorance was bliss. Whereas now I seem to explain a life of turmoil. Well if that’s the case maybe this article is either not for you or it comes too early in your own process but in short it was the day that began my awakening.
Granted, it took me another 8 years and another ‘stand-out’ story from my life to really get the ball moving but without this day none of it would have ever happened and god knows where I would be today. No doubt sat in the same sales office twitching and plagued with acute illness.
17years ago today I nearly died in a terrible road traffic accident and the experience this afforded me, as I began to wake up to my mortality and the finite period of time that we all get to experience on this earth was life changing. Today, I can see a direct correlation to that experience and the fact that I now live in the beautiful hills of Portugal, with my amazing wife and two beautiful young daughters. We have taken our lives semi off grid and at times really thrown ourselves in at the deep end but we have grown and experienced so much more than we would have in our comfy lives back in the UK.
9 years ago I couldn’t even use a roller to paint my house, now I am extremely well versed in all aspects of diy as well as many other practical skills. We keep organic fruit trees and are about to plant our allotment and if the world went to completely nuts over night I now know that I could look after my family. My children speak two languages fluently, and both have really come out of their shells and they get to grow up in the sun, in a real old school community village.
Everyday I get to practice in a job that I do not see as work, with the added bonus of changing the lives of my clients in the process. Most of all, I feel more “in tune” with my mind, body and frequency than I ever have.
Life is awesome and the accident was the event that lit the initial spark that I needed to pivot toward a life more in line with my true calling.
I was lucky, my near death experience happened early enough in my life for me to do something about it but the truth is, many of us do not realise this until we are on our death bed. Death bed regrets are all too common in this modern world that we live in.
It’s important to realise that change comes in many ways, it doesn’t always have to be a positive happy occasion that changes your life for the better. In fact more often than not its through adversity or struggle that real change does happen. Just keep your eyes and your mind wide open but above all, if something in your life feels out of balance don’t wait for your own car accident to do something about it.
Go deep with meditation, journal everyday, right down every thought that lingers, make a list of everything in your life that does not serve you and take action, write down everything that truly floats your boat and see how much is already a part of your life. If its not, introduce it today. Start a hobby, start a side hustle, learn about subjects you love and see where it takes you. Go on walks, get out in nature, go back to your childhood.
Most of all, realise that this life is not a dress rehearsal, there aren’t any do overs, you have to make this one count and if you need clues on how to achieve this, do all of the things that get the good butterflies going in your tummy. Step outside of your comfort zone everyday, learn, try, fail but live.
If it’s jumping out of a plane, do it. If it’s traveling the world, do it. If it’s setting up a business selling classic comics, do it. If its starting a blog about something you love, do it! If it’s changing your career to something that you have a genuine love for, do it!
You can make anything work if you do it with passion and you work hard at it, you just need to re calibrate what success and happiness truly is.
So what are your thoughts, have you had any stand out experiences that would be part of your story? If so what were they?
Feel free to leave a comment, and as always, like, share and subscribe.
Until next time
Stay groovy xx