Alison Wright's Brush with Death

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Outside Magazine February 2005

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Out There
The Life That Almost Wasn't
She survived a near-fatal accident in Laos, only to be told that her adventure travels were over forever. Why one woman refused to listen. Read Wright's current story and then read If I Can Only Breathe from Outside's May 2001 issue.

By Alison Wright

IT'S A STRANGE THING, WHEN YOU LOOK BACK on a life-threatening catastrophe: Survival, it turns out, is what you can least control. The sheer physical resilience, the miraculous luck that keeps you from bleeding to death on a jungle roadside, thousands of miles from home; the fact that you—for whatever reason—make it out alive when others don't. Those things are humbling, yet they're not sustaining. You're alive. But your life is changed forever.

I know, because it happened to me. In January 2000, while I was traveling through Laos on a Southeast Asia photo assignment, the bus I was riding in was sheared in half by a logging truck. My seat was at the point of impact. The force of the crash instantly broke my back, pelvis, coccyx, and ribs; my left arm plunged through a window, shredding it to the bone; my spleen was sliced in half; my diaphragm and lungs were punctured; my heart, stomach, and intestines tore loose and lodged in—yes, it's possible—my shoulder. I would have bled to death if it hadn't been for passersby, including a British aid worker, Alan, who drove me seven hours, bouncing and jarring over potholed roads, to a hospital in Thailand. Three weeks later came the return home to Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, in San Francisco, and a rehab battle that doctors told me was hopeless. "You'll never walk properly again," they said.

Their negativity seemed outlandish. I had already survived, hadn't I? I'd kept myself alive and conscious for 14 hours without medical help, following my meditation practice by focusing on my breath, believing each one to be my last. I'd been taken from the crash site to a "health clinic" that turned out to be a filthy, dirt-floored shed where there were no doctors. I'd handled the most excruciating agony I'd ever experienced, when a T-shirt-clad Laotian kid, who looked no older than a teenager, poured alcohol on my mangled arm and stitched it to stop the bleeding—with no painkillers. Several times I'd closed my eyes and prepared to die, yet somehow it didn't happen. How could anyone tell me I was doomed?

"You're going to have to face reality," the doctors said.

Obviously, they didn't know me.

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ALISON WRIGHT's first essay about surviving the Laos bus accident, "If I Can Only Breathe" (May 2001), won the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award.

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