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This story was originally the content of a letter written April 25, 1994, for Lordson’s twin nieces Karen and Kelly in Los Angeles.

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By now it is no longer news that I am stuck at home with a heavy cast on my left leg from top to toes and moving around slowly with a pair of crutches. Today as I look back to the accident, I guess I do not mind so much the pain and the surgery I went through; what kills me now is that I must put in the time, a minimum of six weeks, before I become freely mobile again.

Francisca says that I often seem to think of myself as indestructible and invulnerable, that now I’ve challenged my fate to its limit; so perhaps this had to happen to me at some point in my life.

Another friend jokingly said that it almost seems as if I did this to myself just so that I would have another story to tell of my life!

Whatever the reason, our trip to Banaue, a town nestled in 2000-year-old rice terraces was a total disaster.

It was supposed to be the annual company outing for Francisca’s office, and as usual I tagged along to keep her company. Her eight staff members plus the two of us all packed into a hired mini-van with a driver. It was to be a 10-hour drive to cover only 360 km, but the roads were really bad.

Two hours before reaching our destination, as we were climbing up into the rice terrace hills at about 4:30 pm, a large jeepney with over 30 passengers racing downhill overtook a big bus on a blind curve and hit us head-on.

Everyone in our van was injured to some degree; lots of strains, cuts, bruises. Our driver was most seriously hurt with multiple bone fractures, chest injury and internal bleeding. I was the second worst — with several broken bones in my leg.

When it happened, Francisca was sitting behind the driver and I next to her behind the engine. The two guys up front were thrown out of the van and the rest of the staff sitting behind us got battered about.

The impact was so great that the engine caved in and a piece of metal cut into my left leg. I briefly blacked out, but when I came back to, I saw the engine smoking and blood all over me. I got hold of my leg, saw the broken bones sticking out, then turned to Francisca and said, “look, dear, I am hurt pretty bad!”

By this time many people had gathered around the wrecked van and I asked someone to carry me out to a jeep. Francisca and a couple of her staff also made it into the back of the jeep and we were driven to the local clinic in the village about ten minutes away. The entire way I was holding my leg with a towel which didn’t take long to turn bloody red.

When we got to the clinic someone finally laid me down on a wooden bench. Francisca was laid down next to me on another bench. We were holding hands, asking each other the same question, “are you okay?”

I said, “my leg hurts; other than that I’m okay.”

But when she then kept repeating the same questions, “what happened?” “’where are we?” and “is everybody okay?” over and over and over, I realized she had lost her short-term memory and I began to worry that she might have amnesia or a concussion. I took it that she had taken one look at the awful cut on my leg, then, instead of passing out, she mentally blocked it out: she went into shock. While she still appeared conscious, she was not really there.

There were lots of people around waiting to be treated in the clinic and there was only one doctor. After about half an hour, this doctor finally came to look at my leg. She apologized for the lack of medical facilities and equipment in her clinic and said she needed to sew up my wound to stop the bleeding. Then she did it while I was lying on the bench, without painkiller or anesthesia. Not even a shot of local rum! At this point, the pain from the cut and the broken bones was so powerful that my whole leg became more or less numb. I could feel the doctor doing the stitches on me, but it did not add to the existing pain.

Sometime later they decided to move us to a provincial hospital in the nearest town about 25 minutes by car. People carried us on our benches up into the back of a pick-up truck, which then started to drive off. Francisca and I, still holding hands, looking up at the blue sky with white clouds, saw tree tops passing by on both sides of the truck. She said the whole scenario was a déjà vu for her, meaning she felt that somehow we had been through this before.

In a crisis situation like this, nothing was more important than realizing that we were still alive and we still had each other.

The provincial hospital was not much better than the village clinic. We were put into beds with no bedsheets. Despite the earlier stitching, my wound kept on bleeding slowly and soon I was lying in a big puddle of blood on top of the vinyl covered mattress. Later they took some X-rays of my leg to see how the bones had been fractured.

Francisca’s staff eventually all gathered in the hospital and decided to hire a car to return to Manila that night. But before leaving, they arranged with nearby American missionaries to use their small plane to fly Francisca and me back to Manila the next morning.

After lying in bed for two and a half hours, the doctor finally took me into the operating room to clean up my wound and put a temporary cast on for the flight the next morning. When this was done, I was sent back to the room to stay with Francisca for the night.

Up to this point, I’d still been given no anesthesia nor a single pain killer!

I sometimes had felt that the scene of someone lying in a hospital bed, with an intravenous bag hanging and the doctors and nurses pushing the bed across the hall into the operating room was something that only happened in the movies.

Certainly I never imagined that it would happen to me one day! And I probably believed that if it did, I would mentally break down before any physical damage was done.

But now when it finally did happen to me I have discovered that I am much stronger than I ever thought. I may even have surprised everyone by maintaining very high spirits all the way through, with not one word of complaint, nor a single sound of moaning or whining.

I guess in a real situation of life and death, my survival instincts surface and take command.

By the middle of the night all the staff had left except a young one, Jeanette, who had decided to stay behind to keep us company. Francisca had fallen asleep. The night was cool and quiet. And we didn’t have any idea where we were! I was lying next to a window, smoking my last few cigarettes. The pain slowly subsided as I did not move my leg.

Jeanette limped around the room, having strained a knee, and refused to lie down to sleep. She said she felt she might never wake up again. I knew what she meant. The bruises, the pain, the shock and the fear finally crushed her as the night got cooler and quieter. She came and sat down by my side. I held her, trying to comfort her, and there was still a long night ahead.

The next morning we were flown to Manila in the small missionary’s plane; that took a little over an hour. After a night’s sleep it seemed Francisca recovered her memory. But she still could not remember what happened at the accident site.

I was then sent into a proper hospital and began to receive proper medical treatment. Because of the delay in treating my wound the day before, my leg was operated on three times before a cast was put on me. I lay in the hospital for two more weeks before Francisca and my brother Simon from L.A. came to pick me up to drive me home. It was nice of Simon to make a detour on his trip and come down from Hong Kong to visit me for a week.

So that was the story of our accident. By now the novelty has worn out, and I am living a routine life, spending my days in the study room of our house where the air-conditioning keeps my leg with the cast from getting too hot and swollen. By the time you receive this letter it will be sometime in June, and I hope it won’t be too long before the doctor removes my cast and I am free once more.

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Postscript: the two week hospital confinement had the positive effect of motivating Lordson to quit smoking. He went from a two-pack a day smokeaholic to clear and free, and up to today, in 2007, he has not touched a single cigarette.