My Story -18 years ago but still this vivid in my mind

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.