My Story -18 years ago but still this vivid in my mind
On the
Friday before school started our football team played a scrimmage game at our
school. Afterwards, my friend Jessica, along with her brother Frank, headed home. Jessica
would usually give me a ride home because the city had recently put Domenigoni
Expressway – a new highway right behind my house that created a shortcut from
my house to hers. “Shotgun” I called out as I hopped into the front seat. This
was the last time in my life I ever called “shotgun.”
As
we drove around a corner on the new highway I saw the brightest white light I
have ever seen coming straight at us. None of us had enough time to figure out
what it was, but I knew it was about to hit us. I curled myself up into a ball
and a split second later I heard the car crushing felt the car spin off the
road as if it were spinning in slow motion. All three of us were silent through
the whole crash, it happened too fast to be able to interpret and react to what
was happening. I opened my eyes to find the dashboard pressed into my right leg
and my leg pressed into my chest. My left leg laid stiff and twisted out to the
side in a position I could never demonstrate. The air was filled with dust and
an eerie feeling. Pieces of broken glass trickled down on me every so often
like a light sprinkle of rain. My legs and the shattered windshield that
dangled a few inches from my head was all I could see. After reality of what
had actually just happened began to sink in, Frank spoke first. “Are you guys
OK? I thought about his question as all the pain in my body began to radiate
from my deep in my bones up to the surface of my skin. My back felt as if
someone tried to fold my spine in two, and my legs just felt numb. I finally
answered in a soft spoken voice. “No… I, I think I’m paralyzed. I am
paralyzed.” Jessica took off her seat belt, jumped out of the car and began
screaming, “Oh my god,… oh my god.” Frank’s door didn’t budge when he tried to
get out so he crawled out the driver’s side door and went to calm her down. I
didn’t even try to move, I had no choice but to sit there completely trapped
between the seat and the dashboard. I didn’t know what injuries I had, I just
knew my body hurt worse than I could ever imagine possible, worse than I will
ever be able to remember. “Jessica” I told her, “ If I die you can have
everything in my room”. Saying this made her go hysterical, but I remained
quite calm as I sat there in my state of shock.
Finally
a few cars stopped and one man took Frank to my house that was only about one
minute away, to call 911. Those who stopped seemed so useless, there wasn’t
really anything they could do for me. “Where is he?” “Does anyone have a
flashlight?” They were all looking for the man on the motorcycle who had hit us
head on. I couldn’t see a thing that was going on outside of the car, I just
sat listening, trying to figure out what there were talking about. “We have to
find him.” Find him… I repeated to myself, what do they mean find him? He
better not have just driven away and left us here, I thought.
It
seemed like the emergency crews were taking forever. I thought I had been quite
patient but I could no longer take the pain as it just kept increasing through
my body. Being one who has never cussed, I yelled “When is the freaking
ambulance going to freaking get here?” I couldn’t understand what kept taking
them so long. Finally, the firefighters showed up first. I felt relieved and
less alone, but the pain still had control of me. As the pain continued to seep
into my bones, I didn’t feel much emotion, good or bad. I never felt scared,
sad, angry, reassured, or hopeful as I sat stuck in the car. It only felt like
I had been stripped of every emotion I would be able to feel and left with an
empty hole that could only be filled with vicious pain. “My back hurts and my
leg hurts” I told one firefighter as he approached me. He touched my big toe
which comforted me a lot more than his cheesy line that went something like,
“Everything will be OK, we will get you out of there as soon as we can”. I felt
his finger as he touched my toe and I then knew for sure that I was not
paralyzed. I felt completely relieved for a second, but then the all the pain I
felt came back to haunt me some more. I sat there, moaning with every breath I
took, telling them, ’I don’t care what you do, just hurry and get me out.”
Most
of the emergency personnel did not come to check on me. Like the others who had
stopped, they were attending to the motorcyclist. When a firefighter came to
check on me I asked him, “Is he dead?” He hesitated before he replied, “I don’t
know… they are checking him out right now.” I knew he was lying and just didn’t
want me to get upset. “Yeah right” I thought. “He is dead, I know it,” I said
quietly. I didn’t emotionally respond to the fact he died, I had too much of my
own physical pain to deal with to care about him at all.
Finally
they came with the jaws of life. I expected it to take as long to use the jaws
of life and is takes to use a can opener, but that is not the case. I sat,
under a white sheet – same ones they cover you with if you die as they slowly
welded away at tearing open the car. After over an hour of being squished in
misery, they finally had the car
cut apart and put me on a stretcher and into an ambulance. “Do we get to turn
on the sirens?” I asked the EMT. They looked at me funny for asking, but said
yes. The rest of the night became pretty blurry after they gave me a high
dosage of Morphine. In the hospital, the doctors discovered I had two fractures
in my left leg, a fractured ankle and three fractures to the lumbar vertebrae
in my lower spine. Then I felt alone again, stuck in a small pink room with my back in a brace, a leg in a cast, a tube in my arm, and a pan to pee in.
After the investigations began, I
learned more about the accident, and the man on the motorcycle. The man in
his thirties worked construction on a new dam they were building near my house.
He went to a bar after work. He asked at the bar for a ride home and the people
there ignored him. So at 10:20
that night he attempted to drive home. When turning onto the divided highway,
he started driving down the wrong side of the highway, into oncoming traffic. He met us
on a curve in the road and drove his motorcycle straight into my friend’s car.
He hit only the front right passenger side of the car, the “shotgun” seat I was
sitting in. His motorcycle was ripped apart into two major chunks and many
little pieces. He died instantly when he hit the windshield, then flew over the
car, and landed on the side of the road.
Please don't drink and drive... or let others do so.
