Mental Health, Part 1: The Dangerous Fallacy of Invincibility

When I was a sophomore in college, I got hit by a truck. And this isn’t the beginning of a joke, or a metaphor for feeling shitty (on a tangent, any time I hear people say, “I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck/bus,” I laugh because trust me, that’s definitely not how you feel).

I was in a crosswalk, and the driver of the grocery delivery truck was on his phone and didn’t come to a full stop at the intersection. It was a beautiful day, and I was walking back from class and thinking about how excited I was for the rest of the semester (it was only Day 2). The impact threw me into the air, and I landed on my foot. If he had been going even a fraction faster, he would have thrown me into the parked car that was only a few feet farther away. As it was, I destroyed the foot I landed on. Multiple fractures (that my surgeon eloquently described as “messy”) and crush injuries. The first surgery I had put some major metal in my foot, including an external fixator that made my foot look like Frankenstein’s monster, which was anchored into my bone and extended outside of my foot by about 2 inches. The second surgery removed the temporary metal pieces (which, thank goodness, because I kept knocking the fixator against the side of the tub when I got into the shower, and it’s about as painful as it sounds). The third surgery fixed some other things because I was still in some serious pain a year and a half after the second one. My foot will never be 100% again, and the healed fractures ache when a storm is coming, but I’m so thankful that walking semi-normally is possible again.

This isn’t a story I share a lot. It’s not a secret, but it always seems to make people uncomfortable when they find out what happened. It became an interesting social observation opportunity for me—seeing what people would say when they first found out what happened or asked me about it (What? I was bored out of my mind during recovery and sick of strangers being nosey; I had to stay sane somehow). The two most common questions I got are particularly illuminating, in my opinion.

• Were you on your cell phone/texting/jaywalking? This question is really any version of, “please confirm for me that this was in some way your fault and not a horrible random piece of chance so that I can comfort myself by believing that this could never happen to me or someone I love.” No. This wasn’t my fault at all. I look both ways when I cross the street, and fuck you for even implying that even if it was my fault in some form, that you would have done better.
• Did you sue the guy? I always laugh when people ask me this. And it’s a slightly uncomfortable laugh because I was raised to not really talk about money so frankly. But yes. I did sue him. In fact, I met with my lawyer for the first time the morning before my first foot surgery. The lawsuit was stressful, but I was lucky to have a great lawyer. We settled close to a year after the accident. It was great to have that money to help with expensive medical bills, and I used some of it to buy a new camera and take a fun vacation. I went through another $10k when my first internship out of school didn’t pay enough to cover basic expenses and I used my savings to cover those until I got a real job.

I think this is also an important story in the way that it highlights the terrifying role that health plays in financial security. What if I had been uninsured? It was bad enough dealing with the insurance I did have. When the ambulance was taking me from the scene of the accident to the ER, I called my mom and told her to notify our insurance company because I had myself convinced that they only covered ER visits if they had prior notification (I was wrong—that was the case with Urgent Care visits. But I subconsciously also wanted to talk to my mom while sitting in an ambulance).

The number of phone calls, billing mistakes, bills, insurance notifications, and confusing claim denials were astronomical. I was stressed and scared during my recovery, and yet I still had to deal with horrible service from the people who were supposed to be helping me get better. In one memorable call, I received a bill for $800 a year and a half after the surgery it was for. I called the hospital to complain and get clarification, and then found out that insurance had denied it because the hospital had filed the claim too late. When I expressed anger and disbelief that I was getting hit with the bill for their problem and at such a late date, the guy on the phone straight up agreed with me and waived the charge. Going through this process was probably one of the big factors in my enthusiasm for FIRE once I found the movement—I never want to be that financially vulnerable again. But it’s also one of my big worries about early retirement and healthcare costs. It doesn’t matter that I’m young and healthy; another truck could hit me tomorrow (and hit me once, shame on you, but hit me twice and I’m definitely super unlucky and should probably check myself into a safe padded room).

But what was even harder than the healthcare hoops to jump through or the painful surgery and recovery was the mental health toll. The reason I’m talking about this story now is because it’s Mental Health Awareness Month, and I couldn’t talk about mental health without talking about the impact of this event (pun totally intended). There’s a magical cut-off date when the healthy, able people around you decide that you should be over it. Once I didn’t have a physical indication of my injury and its accompanying pain (like a boot, crutches, or the genius invention of the knee-walker), I must be all better. It didn’t matter that walking was still painful, or that I still had horrible flashbacks to the accident and its aftermath. That I’d have to pause in the middle of my workday at my summer internship and silently sob in my cubicle because I suddenly couldn’t stop thinking about it, or that some nights I’d lay in my bed and cry for hours. And those flashbacks were rarely about the accident itself, but rather its aftermath and repercussions. One that came up a lot was the memory of the first time I showered after the accident. It was days later because it took that long to get a shower chair, and my roommate and best friend had to help me get into the shower. I was embarrassed and ashamed and So. Damn. Tired. Of it all. And that was only three days in. Another highlight? Being delirious from pain as my mom drove me cross-country to recover at home and feeling like a failure for having to take a semester off. It would take 30 minutes of crying in the back seat before I could buck up the courage to give myself the blood thinner injections in my stomach that were to prevent clotting.

No one saw those moments. And after 6 months, it had been “long enough” that I should have been able to move past it. Part of that was on me, for not accepting that I could need help and ask for it without being weak. But part of it is on society, for sending that message in the first place. I felt like I had to be upbeat and positive about everything, to the extent that my default when talking about the accident (which is still my default now) was to joke about it. Lighten the mood so that the people around me both a) wouldn’t be too uncomfortable and b) wouldn’t judge me for being broken. And the fact that I felt that way and had that feeling reinforced by others is not okay.

If any of this story resonates with you, if you’ve ever felt forgotten and weak, or like you can’t handle the challenges that life is throwing at you, know that you aren’t alone. And just because pain, whether physical or mental, isn’t visible, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. It doesn’t mean you aren’t strong, and it doesn’t mean you don’t deserve help.

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places. –Ernest Hemingway