everything you know is questioned • but everything you question is dismissed • you question everything anyway
As my bumper made contact, I was certainly dead: my death was not just immediate but inevitable, based on what I could see coming toward me.
Somehow, I remember seeing. Seeing was all I had in those fleeting seconds. All I remember being able to do was see: though I could feel my limbs clenching, I couldn’t move a muscle when I tried.
I had been speeding on that wet road, rounding a bend, when it happened. In my feeble defence, it was a road I knew well enough to speed on, with no other traffic that late. And damn, I really needed to pee. I was whizzing home to whiz.
I have a single sensory reference point for what followed: sleep paralysis, which I experienced once in my university dorm room. Sometime before the light came into the sky one morning, I opened my eyes to find myself locked into my body. At first, this was only strange, maybe inconvenient.
My room was a rectangle, with a big rectangular window overlooking the sodium-lit walking paths and side streets. Every night, the lamps below cast everything near the windows in a Halloween palette. I could move my eyes, but not my body, so I took in the orange and brown and black.
As I watched, the shadows in the room… gathered. I sensed something was horribly wrong, and tried to scream, to jolt out of bed. Nope: my limbs were locked down. The shadows flickered into the shape of a human figure, which perched momentarily on the radiator at the base of the window, at the far right of my field of vision.
Then it sprang toward me. I felt myself desperately trying to shout as the shadow man-orb whooshed toward my face, rushed into me, combined with me. I opened my eyes again to find my room back the way it was, but my body still unable to scream or move, and I laid there, heart racing, wondering if I had died. Eventually, sensation began to tingle back into my extremities, and it all… went away.
Somehow, this extremely detailed memory replayed through my mind as I pattern-recognized my instantaneous change. I was steering and modulating the pedals; then, my right leg had clenched into place, flooring the accelerator; my hands, though I could see them on the wheel, were not responding to my brain, nor was my foot.
In horror, I watched as my momentarily inaccessible limbs failed me. I could see a car ahead, parked on the right shoulder, lights off. I couldn’t adjust the steering and my car was only speeding up. Ahead of me was a forested cliff, some houses. To the left, across a lane, a plunge over a cliff into a turbid lake.
I could feel the steering wheel shift slightly to the right, and knew this meant my car was accelerating straight toward the parked one. Ever the car nerd, I recognized the rear of a black mid-2000s Mustang. I took in that my out-of-control red electric Mustang was about to kill me by crashing us into another older Mustang.
As my Mustang headed toward its Mustang-on-Mustang fate, the noise in my mind quieted. Oh, so I’m going to die. Maybe I’ve already died. There’s no way I can survive this. My left leg, propped on the driver door, undulated with the resonant bumping of the car I called þony, which is pronounced the way Carmela says Tony. (Ask the Icelanders in your life what þorn can do for you.)
The tail lights shimmered and refracted my headlights as I approached. In my mind, I expected the archetypal car crash scene: windshield exploding, airbags exploding, blood and bones exploding through flesh. It got closer, closer, closer, closer.
I was surprised by what came next. I watched, glued in place, as my car crushed the parked one like a pop can under a teenager’s foot. It crumpled flat, right up to the B-pillar (behind the front row). My windshield didn’t break. My airbags did their thing. My car was, all things considered, pretty intact. And I was suddenly able to stand, walk, talk, think.
I staggered out of the car as it and my phone somehow both called 911 on the same line at the same time, speaker squawking a garbled combination of two intake voices until I could stop the car’s call. There was a giant cloud of dust and smoke around me. The parked car I hit had shot 35 feet forward, as if I were playing some chaotic game of car-curling.
I couldn’t believe that I was alive. The flustered homeowner whose parked car was destroyed couldn’t believe I was such a jerk speeder. The cop that came couldn’t believe I had managed to slam the other car so far ahead. And I couldn’t explain myself, so I left the scene in the back of a cruiser, my bladder still over capacity.
My car was totalled. My licence was suspended. I got a ticket for reckless driving. Had I sought medical attention that night, it would have meant another hour’s drive to the nearest hospital, and it was by no means clear to me how I would get back to my apartment.
I called my then-boyfriend, in shock, in the wake of the accident, splattering him with my verbal diarrhea as I clung to my sanity. Days later, he broke up with me.
Did I mention that I really, really, really needed to pee? The ride home in the uncushioned, caged backseat had me constantly crossing my legs, locking my knees to keep from defiling the cruiser.
The story of an aristocrat who was too polite to ask to be excused from a long-winded meal and who died due to his bladder exploding because of his politesse rattled around my skull as I sobbed as quietly as possible, not wanting to worsen the evening by triggering the cop.
My biological imperative to evacuate by bladder and bowels the only thing driving me, I sprinted to the bathroom from the car. As soon as the built-up tension left my pelvis, I sank swollen into bed, into a grimoire of extremely dark thoughts.
Þony the Mustang drove its final ride on January 5, 2024, coming to a spectacular ending at 11:20 PM Pacific on the winding two-lane northbound into Shawnigan Lake.
For the next 13 months, I was plagued by flashbacks to the accident, as my life continued to fall apart. Nobody around me believed I was anything other than a crazy mess, a disaster of a person who had squandered his life and paid the price.
I left an apartment in a chaotic state and a storage locker full of my belongings in a place I had barely any connections. I could not explain what had happened to me, or why it had become so impossible to handle the daily functionalia of life.
My embattled parents found themselves with a thirty-something disabled dependent in their house, personality unfamiliar, life in tatters, unable to make progress from a profound stuckness. The friends I had been closest with almost unanimously gave up on me: I had gone crazy, and they made no real effort to pretend as if they thought otherwise. I was just another lost cause, rambling at them about harebrained ideas.
Mercifully, there were a handful of people who never gave up on me despite hearing from me in the wake of the accident. (Thank you, Angus, Lisa, George, Katie. Mom and Dad, too.) There were many more I did my level best to keep in the dark (being off social media definitely helped), so as to not lose even more friends and connections.
The old friends who gave up on me were people who I really could have benefited from having on my side: a Government of Canada epidemiologist and ex-roommate whose wedding party I was in; a person I once called my best friend who told me that she had talked about my failed marriage on both coasts and said “now I know what you’re like when you’re crazy” with barely disguised hostility.
Glib as it may sound, PTSD was old hat for me. I’ve had enough trauma and flashbacks thereto in my life to grasp that these fragmented memories play a critical role in processing, identifying, integrating, understanding, healing.
But before they become clarifying, they are necessarily stifling: I have found myself freezing into a panic attack in public many times, leaning against a random building to regain my composure, brutalized by some neurons that decided to return me to the instants I lost control.
On February 14, 2025, I awoke from a nap having shaken loose a few previously inaccessible memory fragments. (Cupid’s arrow? More like time’s arrow.) I sifted through them and began to realize what had happened to me behind the wheel.
First: the flashes in the sky. I could recall the intense storm lashing my car with rain and challenging the grip of its tires with gusts of wind, but the flashes had newly returned to my visual recollection. Pulses of pink-white and purple in distant clouds.
Second: the rumble-and-pop. The instant I lost control of my limbs, I heard an impossibly loud noise rattling over-through-around me. Locked into my body, the accident racing toward me, I remembered wondering if it had been a thunderclap (and dismissing the idea, because it was so loud and so close, and I hadn’t seen any lightning).
Third: the cedars’ kisses. There was a line of scraggly cedar hedges lining my driveway. The morning after the crash, I found a bizarre rash spreading from my shoulders down my sides and onto my arms and legs. My skin was patterned to look almost exactly like cedar fronds, rendered in pink on olive-white; I assumed I had some kind of contact rash from stumbling into the hedges on my disoriented rush to the bathroom. The rash vanished from my skin and working memory by the next day.
Here’s a medical term I learned recently: pathognomonic. When a symptom or sign is pathognomonic, its presence is enough to confirm that the patient who displays it has a specific condition.
Pathognomonic symptoms are pretty rare, but that’s kind of the point: there’s not much out there which is directly linkable from one medical event to another, given the complexity of the human body.
If you have gotten rabies, and find yourself having a full-blown panic attack at the sight of a glass of water, you are demonstrating a classic pathognomonic symptom, hydrophobia. If you have been bitten by a tick and gotten Lyme disease (borreliosis), the bullseye-patterned rash emanating from the bite is an unavoidable pathognomonic signature which begs you to go get treated quickly. In either case, yikes, empathy, hope you got that handled.
If you have ever been to a doctor for something like a fever, headache, runny nose, cough, or stomach upset, they probably patronized you and gave you a prescription for something. None of these symptoms are specific for anything, and no matter how sick you actually are, the medical system is not configured to test you appropriately in that moment to provide a real answer as to what’s happening and what you should do. So the doctor uses what amounts to a bandage: a pill that should help with the symptoms. If you’re lucky, they might order some testing, some imaging; if you’re really lucky, they order testing or imaging that doesn’t just come back inconclusive.
This has always frustrated me, both as a patient and a member of society. Shouldn’t we try to figure out why someone is sick, so that we can treat them properly for the thing that is making them sick? Isn’t that the whole point of healthcare? It’s in the name: HEALTH-care. Or, health-CARE. Both parts of the compound word are not doing the reality of the situation justice.
It’s as if doctors are fine to pretend that their patients’ health conditions exist exclusively in a tiny vacuum shaped like their examination room. I have never been asked by a doctor if I was exposed to toxic chemicals, for instance, and when I have tried to explain that I should be tested for them I have been (you guessed it!) patronized and ignored. I remember my car filling with a sickly-sweet chemical smell in the wake of the accident. When I told doctors about this, asking them to perform some more advanced toxicology on me than “which drugs are in your system”, I heard that said testing is unavailable.
Same thing when I tried to explain this to my ex-friend the epidemiologist and later on the phone with Poison Control (who, you know, should definitely have had a better answer). “Oh, well, there’s no real testing capacity for toxins. Maybe there are a few labs you can find online, but who knows if they’re going to be accurate?” Almost the exact same words from both people.
(Should we not maybe think about building the capacity to test for toxic chemicals in a country where they kill people at high rates? Call me crazy. Oh, wait… they already did. Never mind.)
After my flashback to the cedar kisses, I found myself searching online for photographs of plant-like rashes. There’s a name for their appearance, as it turns out, a rather lovely, evocative word: arborescent.
Another useful word that applies to an arborescent rash? Pathognomonic.
Turns out, after all the unraveling in my life, all the rudderless swaying and desperate reaching and systemic dismissal and abandonment by the people I loved… the rash I wrongly attributed to a plant attack was actually a sign beyond doubt that I had survived an electrical injury.
Arborescent rashes are the skin manifestation of Lichtenberg figures, named after a Swedish electrical scientist who learned that you can shock things and then see the pattern of the electrical discharge afterwards. Dust on a metal plate, for instance. Sand below ground can form amazing glass crystals called fulgurites after being struck by lightning, tracing the branching path of the discharge.
A mere mortal’s lumpy, wet flesh, filled with tiny electrical conductors, turns out to be another perfect playground for Lichtenberg figures. On people, they take on a pattern described as fern-like, tree-like, arborescent. (You’ll find lots of terribly inaccurate tattoos of lightning on people’s bodies: they should really go with a bruise-coloured branching cedar pattern if they want to rep the bolt.)
An arborescent rash shows up within 24 hours of a major electrical shock, whether from lightning or a machine, and then dissipates back into the skin within 48 hours. It is pathognomonic, but fleeting, so if it’s not documented, it becomes as ephemeral as its source.
In my case, my woozy memory of a rash turns out to be the only documentation I will ever be able to produce that I, myself, was struck by lightning as I drove, the current bouncing through some damage I was waiting to get repaired during a parts shortage, electrifying the metal headrest and making a crazy field with all my electronics and jewelry as a New Year’s resolution-killer like never before, the built-up forces abruptly discharging on impact and freeing me into a new kind of prison.
A fading memory, flashing back to me, that maybe the accident wasn’t really my fault, no matter what the cops and insurers and all the people who’d already given up on me had concluded.
Jay Gerbrandt is an entrepreneur, author, and survivor. This piece is AN excerpt from his memoir-in-progress, Overflash: Winning the lightning lottery