The impact of a near-fatal car accident on a couple's relationship, healing process, and the growth of anxiety as they navigate through recovery.
For help and support, call 116 123 to talk to Samaritans or text MRF to 85258 to speak to a trained volunteer from Shout, the UK’s Crisis Text Line serviceGuy was lying on his side, on the grass verge beside the road.
Both cars were unrecognisable, the fronts collapsed into themselves like accordions. It was a rain-soaked Friday afternoon in 2009, we were both 22 and had been dating only a few months. Guy had been in the back of the car; I was in the front passenger seat on the way to a friend’s house on a country road. Thankfully, and miraculously, no one else apart from Guy was hurt.
He was conscious and not bleeding but clearly not okay – groaning and unable to form proper sentences. Filled with adrenaline, I leapt into the ambulance and travelled to hospital with him while paramedics tentatively pinched his toes, testing for paralysis. In these sorts of moments, we all respond differently: some freeze, some fight, some run.
What you do depends on a mix of instinct, experience, genetics, personality traits and umpteen other psychological and cultural factors out of your control. I have a habit of ploughing my energy into smoothing and fixing and improving. I problem-solve at the expense of difficult emotions.
And that’s what I did – or tried to do – in Southampton General Hospital, as Guy lay on a deathly quiet ward over a summer weekend with a broken back, perforated small bowel and peritonitis, an internal infection of the stomach lining that can be life-threatening. At that point we didn’t know about the latter two conditions.
Filled with adrenaline, India Sturgis leapt into the ambulance and travelled to hospital with her then-boyfriend Guy while paramedics tentatively pinched his toes, testing for paralysis I remember running up and down dark passageways – automatic lights coming on as I ran, confirmation that truly no one was about – trying locked doors and looking for someone, anyone, who might know what to do or get him pain relief as he turned progressively greener. The next day, Monday, when the senior medics returned and the hospital came back to life, a scan revealed the severity of the situation.
By now, Guy’s stomach was wobbly and swollen and he was vomiting. He was raced into surgery and had a two-foot length of small bowel removed. According to the surgeon, it looked like a gunshot wound. Waiting for him to come out was terrifying but he finally did, and was moved to an intensive care unit for three weeks before they could flip him over to operate on his back.
He emerged from hospital a few weeks after that with a beard like Tom Hanks in the desert island film Cast Away, but far paler. He had to build up to walking again but, like a superhero, he healed. His body fused and renewed. He also remained in remarkable spirits throughout, making jokes about being the nurses’ favourite and never complaining despite the months he spent in a back brace, and the endless rehab.
I buried myself in the minutiae of his recovery: redressing wounds, and providing painkillers, cushions and crutches. But he was fine. He would be fine. I was too.
We all knew how lucky we had been. If the crash left a mark on me, it remained unseen. This wasn’t my first car accident, either. I’d been in four others: one almost as severe, involving a motorway and a lorry, and three other minor collisions including one with a postman.
Each time, I wasn’t hurt – not really. All were frightening. But, ostensibly, I was fine. If the crash left a mark on me, it remained unseen.
This wasn’t my first car accident, either. I’d been in four others, writes India Eight years later, Guy and I got married in my parents’ garden in Suffolk, surrounded by family and friends, and life settled into a busy pattern in London. I worked as a newspaper journalist and he was in finance .
We had a good circle of friends and, though hectic and pressured at times, our lives were underscored by humour and decent doses of irony. I have always trusted him implicitly. We don’t have to explain a lot to be well understood by each other and he is, absolutely, the kindest, funniest man I know.
We met, according to him, at Leeds University and, according to me, at his best friend’s 21st birthday a few months before that, where Guy had given a speech that had everyone in stitches. I had attempted to say hello to him, which he doesn’t remember, and which I now haven’t let him forget. We started seeing each other in the last year of university and I never questioned our future. It has always been so obvious.
It was a surprise to both of us then that I would go on to test us to such an extent. Slowly, in the background of daily life, something was growing in me: anxiety that wound itself through my mind and body. Eight years after the car accident, Guy and India got married in her parents’ garden in Suffolk, surrounded by family and friends Not that I’d have labelled it that explicitly at the start.
Back then, I didn’t feel I fitted the mould of an anxious person. I didn’t feel anxious all or even much of the time, and yet there it was – an illness as debilitating as a broken back – quietly gathering pace. It began as insomnia. I was in my mid-20s and on the odd night just couldn’t switch off, instead tossing and turning into the early hours.
Still, everyone has periods of poor sleep, don’t they? I kept calm and carried on.
Then it got worse. The single night of sleeplessness every now and then turned into several in a row and started to happen more often. I began to worry about the effects of not sleeping on my health and work, and started fretting about how I would get through the day after a night of no or little rest. Anxiety about anxiety is an inextricable trap that can feel dizzying.
Guy was optimistic things would get better and that the insomnia would simply lift in time. When I woke in the night, he’d give me a sleepy pat on the back and never complained about my nighttime activities: the getting in and out of bed, loud sighs, frantic duvet fluffing, and more. He was a pool of calm level-headedness, which was lucky because by 2019, after seven years of on-and-off insomnia, the wheels were really coming off.
Ten years earlier, I’d been the one looking after him, now the tables had turned and he faced a far more amorphous, confusing and insidious problem in his other half. By now we had a baby daughter, a phenomenal source of joy and the focus of all our energy and combined resources.
He was a pool of calm level-headedness, which was lucky because by 2019, after seven years of on-and-off insomnia, the wheels were really coming off I’ve never felt anxious looking after her. Paradoxically, she was a welcome distraction from the night-time rumination and added an extra layer of exhaustion that helped me nod off for a time. But returning to work pushed the insomnia back to the forefront and I felt increasingly on edge.
Internally, I felt unhinged, with adrenaline constantly seeping into small moments where it didn’t belong. I was jumpy in cars, too, but only when travelling as a passenger. Now I know the symptoms of PTSD, I can see that this hyper-vigilance was a classic sign. In front of everyone else, I appeared normal.
I laughed and joked. I met deadlines. I washed my hair and looked after our daughter. I could talk about what was bothering other people all day long, but I couldn’t talk about myself: it felt too exposing.
At home, fixated on sleep, I saved up my most Jekyll and Hyde behaviour for Guy. If he returned home late, my anxiety hit new highs. Was he going to wake me up after I’d finally dropped off? Didn’t he know how much I was struggling?
I tried not to text him, unless I was in a real state, to see where he was and when he’d be home. I knew I was being irrational and unfair but falling asleep had become the most important thing in my life. At night, he’d wake up to me punching the pillow or hitting myself, trying to jolt my brain out of overthinking. In return, he absorbed it all.
He didn’t react when I swore at him for stepping on a creaky floorboard or sneezing in bed. He never got cross when we cancelled plans because I was too exhausted and anxious to go out. Over time I started to think he would leave me and take our daughter with him because I was so crazy. That thought was so painful I couldn’t look directly at it; it just flashed through me.
I started sleeping in a separate room and having panic attacks, screaming into a pillow so as not to wake up him or our daughter. Read More We are psychologists, here's how to manage panic attacks when they happen Not long afterwards intrusive thoughts about suicide and self-harm began. I didn’t tell anyone, not even Guy, it was too frightening to articulate what was in my head.
One in five people will have suicidal thoughts in their lifetime, according to suicide prevention charity Samaritans, yet nearly three quarters of the population are unaware of how common those thoughts are. I have asked Guy what this period was like and, although he knew I was struggling and miles from my normal self, he didn’t really know what I was thinking.
As a result, he felt immensely helpless. It felt, he says, as if he was walking on eggshells. He was constantly questioning his natural instincts, which were not to dwell on the bad stuff and instead think of ways to improve the situation by reassuring me I was okay. But no matter what he did, nothing helped.
I got angry when he tried to tell me everything was OK – it didn’t feel that way to me. What we’ve both since realised was that there was often nothing he could have done for me back then. He couldn’t fix me. He was not a mental health professional.
How could he have known what my fractured mind needed? In the same way, he would never have expected me to re-set his broken back. For me, the best thing was simply his presence. Him being there with me, calmly, when my anxiety was ballooning.
He didn’t even have to say anything. As it happens, it was Guy starting a new job and then breaking his wrist playing football that gave me a final push into what felt like real insanity. He couldn’t pick up our daughter, do the dishes, cook, change nappies or lift anything with two hands, which was the final straw for my already overwhelmed mind.
The next week, on the day before my 32nd birthday, after a couple more nights of no sleep, I was admitted to hospital. I had become delusional, talking to myself and losing completely whatever loose grip I had had on reality. I went to a GP who admitted me to the Priory, a psychiatric hospital in London, where I was diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder , chronic insomnia, post-traumatic stress disorder and depression.
Guy took me there, and then called in help at home from both sides of the family. It was a bleak moment, but everyone rallied. I spent one month as an in-patient and two as an outpatient. I was put on antidepressants that helped me to sleep and I had cognitive behavioural therapy.
I tried group therapy, which was enlightening, tried my best at breathing exercises and leaned into a programme of psychoeducation that helped me reduce anxiety and learn how to manage it. It all helped, slowly but surely. Read More Treating depression using CBT therapy could help cut the risk of heart attacks and strokes later in life, study finds It took a long time to realise, too, that I’ll never know the real root of what caused my anxiety.
Most likely it’s a complex picture, a mixture of multiple causal and perpetuating factors. But after meeting a clinical psychologist specialising in neuro-psychophysiology – who hooked me up to an EEG – I learned how deeply the car crash had affected me. When we discussed it she noticed a tremendous reaction in my brainwaves which, she said, was evidence of hyper-vigilance.
If it was traumatic for you, she told me, it was traumatic for your brain. When I came out of hospital, Guy was there – often, literally, left holding the baby when I became overstimulated and had to leave situations suddenly. He learned to ask me ‘what do you need? ’ when I was escalating, which made me concentrate on the answer and calm down enough to give it to him.
My sleep is now boringly normal, which means I sleep badly sometimes but don’t dwell on it. We’ve had another child – a boy – who is nearly two and as funny as his father. This is by no means to say everything is rosy and we have solved my anxiety – that’s not possible or even recommended, given anxiety is an entirely useful, normal feeling.
But I’ve learned the things I need to manage my natural tendency towards it, and have written a book that includes all of them, alongside advice from leading experts and other sufferers who have had pronounced experiences with anxiety, to learn what most benefitted them. The book’s title is based on something else that helped me immeasurably in the mental health doldrums, an African proverb: how do you eat an elephant? The answer being: one bite at a time.
It was this that showed me that recovery is often – necessarily – slow and imprecise. Anxiety may be my Achilles heel, and I’m sure I’ll encounter its rough edges at difficult moments in future, but now I have a toolkit at my disposal to get me through. And one of them – a big bite of the elephant – is Guy.
For help and support, call 116 123 to talk to Samaritans or text MRF to 85258 to speak to a trained volunteer from Shout, the UK’s Crisis Text Line service How to Eat an Elephant: The Life-changing Power of Managing Anxiety, One Bite at a Time by India Sturgis is available now.
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