'There's a good chance I could not have been here' – Liam Clayton

On August 4, 2009, 23-year-old Liam Clayton was driving home to Leicestershire after visiting friends in Kingston Upon Thames, when he was involved in a car crash that almost killed him. Doctors were forced to put him into a coma for three weeks while he received specialist care. Here, Liam talks about the night that would put his life on hold for a year...

“When I didn’t get home, my mum was starting to worry. She was on the phone to the local police number, trying to find out if there’d been any hold-ups on the motorway, and they were telling her that there hadn’t. Then the girl on the phone tells her that there’s been this accident, and starts talking about what the car was. At that point, some lights start coming up the drive and my mum realises it’s the police…

It was a week before I was due to come to America. I’d just finished my first year at Kingston University, and I’d been offered to do study abroad, and thought it would be a great opportunity. I would be going to California for a year, and that was the plan.

I had driven down to Kingston to see a couple of my friends for the last time before I left. In the day I’d been to see one of my friends and visited the London Aquarium and then said goodbye to her and driven home. I think I left about 7pm.

I don’t know if it was actually raining at the time, but it definitely had been. The roads were damp but I’d driven that way loads of times. I was really used to it.

I was listening to music – Fall Out Boy or something like that. Everything was building up to me moving to America, and that’s all I was thinking about at the time.

I was about 15 minutes from home, and that’s when it happened.

I only have two memories of the accident. One is really weird, it’s the memory of a feeling, the point where you know something’s going to happen and there’s nothing you can do about it – that sudden realisation of ‘Oh shit, this is about to happen’.

And then I have a brief blurry memory of sitting in the car, and there’s this girl talking to me, and asking for my home phone number and I couldn’t remember it. My arm is in front of me, and it doesn’t look right. At the time, my arm was broken in two, there would have been blood everywhere, but in my mind all I can think is my arm didn’t look right.

The next thing I know it’s three weeks later.

I’ve talked to the doctor who was at the scene, and I’ve also been sent an accident report so I know quite a lot about what happened now. I had assumed I was unconscious at the scene because I didn’t remember anything, but the doctor told me that I was  conscious the whole time, which was a big surprise for me. I think I was there for about 40 minutes while the fire brigade cut me out of the car, so you’d think that would be something you’d remember.

One of the people who stopped at the scene to try and help out was actually a nurse and she sent me quite a big detailed email about what had happened. She said that I was in a lot of pain and making a lot of noise. She said that she’d never heard anyone in that much distress before, which is strange as I have no recollection of any of that either.

It took me a while to realise how bad it really was once I’d woken up. I had broken both my legs at the femurs; my left knee-cap was in three pieces; my pelvis had a few fractures; the base of my spine was slightly broken; I think I broke a rib; my sternum was broken; my right arm, both of the forearm bones were broken, and one of those had come through the skin; my humerus was broken at the base; my jaw was broken on the left side.

All of the trauma and the fractures caused me to have this thing called ARDS – adult respiratory distress syndrome. Basically your lungs can’t cope and fill up with blood. Despite all my fractures, that was the most serious thing, and the thing that almost killed me.

When I came around, I was trying to work out what was real and what wasn’t. Within three weeks I’d had so many strange, vivid dreams that I’d thought were real at the time, like thinking I was in the Science Museum and that I’d been to New York.

One thing I noticed when I woke up was that my mum and my dad were there at the same time and they hadn’t been in the same room for a long time; I hadn’t seem them together for years. Suddenly they’re sat either side of my bed talking to each other.

I was in the intensive care ward. I can remember some of the other patients. A lot of that now, I’m not sure what was real about it, I was still full of morphine. There was this guy on the other side of the ward, I’m not sure what treatment he was having, but he had to breathe in this chamber, and that’s all warped in my mind now.

There wasn’t an immediate thing of looking down and thinking ‘Oh my God, this is the worst thing ever’, but that came to me over the next week or so. I was working out in my head why I was there and coming to terms with the fact that this was going to take a long time, that this was going to take over my life for a year, which it did.

I was just lying in bed for seven weeks, I had a long time. I didn’t have to get things immediately.

When it comes to thinking that I nearly didn’t make it, that’s much more a long term thing that will probably affect me for the rest of my life. Everything I do or think about, there’s a good chance that I could not have been here.

I suppose, in a kind of weird way, I don’t want to say I’ve been given a second chance, but it is like a second life. It’s hard to describe, but it’s an important thing and I think it will always affect me that way.

The whole thing gave me an extra appreciation for my friends and family. You always know that people are there for you, but when something like that happens, it becomes suddenly obvious that they are. Certain people really came through in ways that almost surprised me. People, not that I wasn’t friends with, but people that maybe I didn’t feel I knew that well or didn’t feel that close to, were suddenly there for me and came out of the woodwork a bit. That was really good because I found that I had perhaps more or better friends than I ever thought I did before.

The recovery was incredibly hard. It was literally a year of my life that it took to get over it. I was going back and forth to the hospital once or twice a week, seeing all these different doctors about my lungs and all these different fractures. I spent three or four months in a wheel chair, three months on crutches and learning to walk again and trying to get back to being fit and healthy.

I never tried to be angry about it, it was more like a frustration. We don’t even know what happened, so it’s more of a frustration of like ‘there’s nothing I can do about this, but why did this have to happen?’.

A lot of people said to me ‘We’re so proud of you, we’re so impressed with how you’ve dealt with this’, but I felt like I didn’t really have a choice, that was just how I had to deal with it otherwise, mentally, I wouldn’t have made it.

At the time I could have just said ‘Well, I’ll go back to Kingston’ but I kept pushing to carry on and come to America. I had my last operation in July, but half way through last August, I flew out as I was supposed to the year before and just started getting on with it, and I’m incredibly glad that I did. If I hadn’t done it, I definitely would have regretted it.

I could have not made it, so you might as well get on with stuff because you never know if something like that is going to happen.

The main doctor at the scene, I met him while I was in hospital. You don’t get to meet many of those people. I’ll never get to meet the fire brigade, the people that did that for me. I was as grateful to them as anybody, but I’ll never get to meet them and say thank you. But I did get to meet this doctor, and I literally felt like he saved my life. He was standing there and I didn’t know what to say to him. But for him it was just his job, and he was the nicest guy. All I could say was ‘thank you’, but it didn’t seem like enough.”