When I was run over by a train in Mumbai and thought I was about to die, my first thought was: “How could I do this to my mum?”
My second thought was about kebabs.
It’s funny how a near-death experience makes you realise what’s important.
It was March 2012 and I had come to India in search of a good kebab. In fact I’d arrived there only a few hours before.
For most of the previous seven months, I’d been travelling around the Middle East, eating meat on a stick as research for a book I planned to write about my search for the best kebab in the world.
People told me I was mad to travel to all those “dangerous” countries alone on my kebab quest (“Iran! Lebanon! Georgia! You can’t go there – something terrible might happen!”) On the other hand, nobody suggested it was dangerous to stop over in India for a few weeks on my way home to Australia.
And yet there I was, underneath a moving train.
I’d been running along a platform trying to get on a train with a German tourist I’d just met at my guesthouse. She jumped on the train as it took off, but I struggled in my thongs to reach the door in time to hop on.
I have no memory of what happened next. All I remember is waking up to hear people yelling: “Don’t move! Stay still!”
I didn’t know where the voices were coming from or if they were talking to me, but on the off chance they were, I remained still.
It was as I made that decision that it dawned on me I’d been in an accident. I recalled a sensation akin to being in a tumble dryer, but it wasn’t until I opened my eyes that I had any idea of what was going on.
There, about 20cm from my face, was a train hurtling over the top of me.
The tumble dryer sensation had been my body ricocheting back and forth between the train and the platform. Somehow I had fallen into the gap between them and landed flat on my back.
I lay still, trying to figure out if I was dead or alive. I don’t know how long I was lying beneath the train, but I know that the whole time I was there, I was waiting to die. I imagined a ladder hanging down from the end of the train taking my head off.
Then the train was gone and I was alive.
People in the crowd on the platform at Andheri station said I was a miracle, that I had good karma.
After I’d been lifted from the tracks, people wanted to touch me. A woman was asking me questions, holding up fingers, ringing my guesthouse on her mobile phone. She asked me if I could walk.
“Where’s my other thong?” I asked.
“Stop talking about your shoes! I’LL BUY YOU ANOTHER PAIR OF SHOES!” she said.
I gathered it wasn’t the first time I’d mentioned my missing shoe. My major concern was that the ground seemed a bit dirty and I didn’t really fancy walking on it barefoot. Her major concern was that I’d lost the sight in my right eye and broken a hip, and possibly my right shin and right shoulder.
Her incessant questioning about my sight made me reach for my face. When I felt the liquid, I looked down at my body for the first time. There was blood all over me.
What happened next still doesn’t make much sense to me. I went to the hospital to have the wounds cleaned on my face, shoulders, elbows, knees, hip and ankle.
But then, against the advice of a doctor, I left without x-rays or a CT scan, clutching only a supply of painkillers and antibiotics. “I’ve had broken bones before,” I kept repeating. “I’m fine.”
Of course I wasn’t fine. When I thought about that train steaming over my head, my heart pounded and sweat leaked from every pore. At those times, I couldn’t figure out if I was alive or dead, and at some point I decided that India was a pretty good place to be if you wanted to figure that out.
For the next three months, then, I continued to travel around India, without telling my family or friends at home what had happened to me.
I decided not to think about the accident. I’d think about that once I’d figured out all the meaning-of-life stuff.
That worked out OK until the tourist friends I’d met only hours before the accident, and who had looked after me like lifelong friends in the wake of it, had to leave.
It was about three weeks after the accident, on my first day alone, that I began to experience severe headspins. I awoke one morning to my room spinning out of control. I clutched the side of my bed to make sure I was still on it and not falling.
At first I refused to acknowledge it had anything to do with the accident, and Googled “iron deficiency” since I’d not been eating much meat. None of my symptoms matched an iron deficiency but I bought iron tablets anyway.
When the dizzy spells got so bad that I felt seasick every morning, I went to see a doctor in a suburban GP clinic in Goa. It turns out post-traumatic vertigo is common after a head injury and the symptoms typically start three weeks after the impact.
The doctor sent me for an MRI scan to make sure the vertigo was the extent of my head injuries. It was almost as terrifying as being run over by a train. Thankfully, I got the all clear. My brain was OK, or at least recovering. What the MRI couldn’t tell me was if it was the head injury, or the shock, that made me act in complete denial about what had happened to me.
In any case, my denial wasn’t over. Instead of addressing my ongoing shoulder pain I booked myself on a flight to Rishikesh, India’s spiritual heartland. When I tried to do yoga there, the instructor told me my shoulder was seriously injured and yoga was a terrible idea.
I went to a different class, but I couldn’t do any of the poses that involved shoulder movement, which was most of them. All my other wounds had healed, but not the shoulder. I still couldn’t lift it three months after the accident. I was still walking around with my forearm at right angles to my upper arm. I still couldn’t wear shirts unless they buttoned up, or tie my hair back or do any action that required lifting my right arm above waist level.
That’s when, finally, I figured it was time to go home, time to tell my family what had happened and have the shoulder x-rayed.
But not immediately.
Instead I booked myself on a 10-day silent meditation retreat run by a Burmese monk in Thailand. It was a dreadful experience. I have never put my body or my brain through so much pain. Sure, there might be some benefits in learning to stop your brain whirring 24 hours a day, but to do that while sitting on a hard wooden floor for 10 hours a day while nursing a painful shoulder is probably not advisable.
At last I returned to Australia and had an x-ray. It turned out my shoulder was broken.
If only I had had the x-ray at the time and immobilised the shoulder properly by way of a sling, it would not have been so completely immobile more than four months later. Also, I would not have had to undergo surgery to fix the many problems that had developed because of my decision to leave the hospital without having any x-rays all that time before.
None of this seemed very amusing during the many months of painful physiotherapy that followed. Even now, although I can swim, dress myself and do my hair in a ponytail, I still don’t have a full range of movement.
My family and friends couldn’t understand why I hadn’t told them, or why I left the hospital without having tests. All I could say was that it felt easier to deal with the pain than consider the fragility of life.
Looking back on it all now, I can see there are some lessons in all this, but very obvious ones that shouldn’t have required a near-death experience:
- Never run in thongs.
- If doctors tell you to get scans or x-rays, get scans or x-rays!
- Don’t take life too seriously. OK, I almost died, but I didn’t. And despite the insanity of this episode, it did make me realise that it was quite simple pleasures that make me happy in life: good conversations, meals shared with interesting people and working at a job I believe in.
• Gabrielle Jackson now lives in Sydney where she works as the deputy opinion editor for Guardian Australia.
• On 12 February 2015 this article was amended to correct the year these events took place.
