At 18 years old, Ryan Reynolds made a responsible call, and it nearly cost him everything.

Reynolds recently shared the story of a terrifying accident from his teenage years that put him in the hospital for weeks. In a video for GQ with his Welcome to Wrexham co-star Rob Mac, Reynolds walked through the night that changed his life.

“When I was 18, I left a bar and I’d had a beer,” he said, according to VT. “I walked back and I looked at my car for a second. I thought, ‘You know what, I’m not going to drive anywhere. Even if it’s four blocks home, absolutely not.’”

So he started walking, and that’s when a drunk driver hit him.

“Instead, I turned around, started to cross the street and I was run over by a drunk driver,” Reynolds said.

“Broke every bone in my left side”
Reynolds was taken to a hospital in Vancouver, Canada, where doctors spent roughly four weeks treating multiple fractures concentrated on the left side of his body. The force of the collision was so extreme that the driver’s car was totaled. Reynolds himself didn’t regain consciousness for three days.

“[I] broke every bone in my left side,” he said, describing his stunned “why God?!” reaction when the reality started to set in.

Though the accident was life-altering, Reynolds has handled it the way he handles most things, with a joke ready. He gave a nod to the medical team who patched him up: “I’d like to thank Dr. Meek at the General Hospital for putting me back together so kindly. Socialized medicine, he couldn’t say no.”

In a 2011 interview with CTV News, Reynolds opened up about just how long the road to recovery really was. These days, he looks back on that younger version of himself as “a rickety, broken mess,” and reflects on how radically different his story could have been if he’d made a different choice that night.