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Posts Tagged ‘car accident’

Today I went out to lunch with a friend from my church.  The lunch was pleasant but the real excitement began after lunch.

I was driving her home when we saw a car accident.  Praise God, it was not a really bad accident, but it did get our hearts pounding.  I was in the left lane on a highway with 2 lanes each direction, and approaching a stop light that was red.  Suddenly we heard a squeal and, in the right lane and just a few feet ahead of us, a minivan had slammed on his brakes.  There was no way he could stop in time.  He rear-ended the other car (incidentally, also a minivan).  It was totally the driver-who-didn’t-stop-in-time’s fault.  He must not have been paying attention or something, because the light was red, the weather was clear, and it was very clear that he should have slowed down.

Like I said, it wasn’t a bad accident, just a bad fender-bender, but it was enough to get our hearts pounding.

Oh, and incidentally, neither minivan was a Toyota.

Give the guy a break.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have surely heard about Tiger Woods’ car accident and all the craziness coming out of it.  And all I can say in response is…

Give the guy a break.

We’ve all had a bad day.  And I daresay that the majority of us have been in a car accident before- I know I have.  Tiger Woods was in a car accident that ONLY involved his car and did not injure anyone else.  All the evidence says that it was exactly that- an accident.  There is no legitimate evidence that he and his wife fought, or that he had an affair, or that anything happened beyond an accident.

So let’s give him a break.  Let him have some time off in peace and let him play golf.  He deserves that from us.

It’s been awhile since I’ve done a meme so, why not- here is my Friday 5.

Which of your stories have you probably told the greatest number of times to the most people?

Uhh… I guess my car accident?  Lots of people are curious about that.  I don’t know, I tell a lot of stories!

What’s a story someone else often tells about you, much to your chagrin?

I don’t know.  I’m not easily chagrinned.  But I should get a reward for using the word “chagrinned” in a sentence.

What oft-told story from a chapter in your life seems to be remembered differently by different people who were there?

Not to be redundant but, my car accident!  It helps that I can’t remember most of it… amnesia rocks…

What are some of the details, without retelling the whole story, of a story you’ve told often but never to your parents?

Some of the crap I did during my first year and a half of college, and some of the crap that happened to me during my first year and a half of college.  ‘Nuf said.

What song would be an appropriate soundtrack to the story of your most embarrassing moment?

I don’t know.  Any suggestions?

Do you ever imagine what your life could have been?  Not in a negative way, just in a… curious way.  I mean, I am in no way complaining about where I am today in life- I have a great life and wouldn’t trade it for anything.

But it is strange to imagine… if I hadn’t had a car accident during high school, I am sure I would have traveled a different path.  I might have gone into medicine, or law (yikes, I might have been one of those really annoying Seattle personal injury attorneys!).  I might have gone into engineering, or… who knows?

My late grandmother had a double hip replacement when I was a kid.  She was actually in a really serious car accident- this guy fell asleep at the wheel, crossed the median, and hit her head-on.  She never drove again, although miraculously she was able to get around fairly well.

Anyway, I read this story today about a durom lawsuit, which I think was the brand of hip replacement she had.  I don’t know about any issues on zimmer durom cup, but I have to give credit to the durom lawyer.  Talk about finding a lawsuit wherever you can!

I am a VERY modest person.  Definitely more than most!  The only males who have ever seen me naked were doctors (and that was in my car accident- it mortifies me and I’m thankful that I don’t remember that!)(at least as an adult- I guess technically I was naked as a baby, but I don’t think that counts).  I don’t like to wear short shorts.  I don’t like to wear clothes that show my stomach- even when I bend over.  I don’t even like to change in locker rooms.  I just do not like for other people to see me naked.

But I’ve heard about many people, mostly Christians, who are going so far as to say that women should wear swimsuits like these.  If you believe that you need to wear one of those, then by all means you should.  But that is not for me.

I like swimming, and not just swimming but swimming strokes for exercise and speed.  To wear a suit with sleeves and/or a long skirt just does not allow enough mobility.  In fact, most amateur racing suits have a much higher leg holes and are much more low cut in the back than ordinary one piece suits.  Now, although I’ll probably never choose to wear a bikini, that is exactly the kind of one-piece that I love.  No more, no less- and I don’t think there is anything immodest about it!

Tonight on Grey’s Anatomy, Justin Chambers/Alex Karev (as the narrator) made a comment: Trauma always leaves a scar. (Or something like that, I don’t remember it exactly.)

Anyway, that got me to thinking about scars.  I have my fair share of scars.  There’s a scar on my knee from when I fell off my bike when I was ten years old.  There’s a scar on my thumb from when I accidentally jammed it into a chisel during a missions trip to Guatemala when I was eighteen.  There’s a scar on my back from when I was wrestling with my dad as a preteen.  There are scars on my left arm and stomach from a freak scissors accident when I was in high school.  I think we all have a collection of scars of one sort or another.

Then there’s the scar that I’m most proud of.  Maybe pride isn’t the right word… but it is.  It’s on my face, under my left eye.  When I was in my car accident, when I was seventeen, I had a lot of bad injuries but, remarkably, they were virtually all internal injuries.  The only spot where my skin broke was below my left eye.  It was stitched up by a maxillo-facial surgeon.  The scar has healed beautifully.  Most people can’t see it.  It’s still there, though, and really quite obvious- it breaks the curvature of the skin around my eye.  This is the only thing that is left from my car accident.  My body has healed so well that you cannot tell, from looking at me, that anything ever happened.  Except for my scar.  (well, unless you were a trained radiology tech looking at a CT scan of my head, I guess!)

A scar is a funny thing to be proud of.  It’s not like the events that led to the scar, or the time after those events, was a “good” time in my life.  In fact it was a pretty horrible time in my life, among the worst.  But that scar is my proof that I lived.  It’s proof that, in spite of everything that happened, I lived.  It’s proof that I’m stronger than my scars.

Of course, physical trauma is not the only trauma to leave scars.  Emotional scars are harder to see but cut deeper and last longer.  There’s a lot of emotional scars in my background, too many to name them all here.  But today I was thinking about the scars I received from my experiences as a teacher in education.  When I student taught, I was placed in a really horrible situation, with a lot of unethical things going on, and I never really stood a chance.  But when I didn’t succeed, I was raked over the coals.  Then when I went to Africa, it wasn’t much better.  Don’t get me wrong- I loved living in Africa.  I loved traveling there and helping people and everything about that.  But the school was horrible.  Again, I was set up to fail and punished when I did not succeed.

All those scars will affect a person.  Physical scars may prohibit you from doing something, physically, that you want to do.  Emotional scars are not very different.  For me, those scars destroyed my self confidence and took away my passion for the job.  They make me wonder if I could succeed as a teacher.  Truth is, I think that if I was in a good school with a good support system, I would be an absolute rock star teacher.  I know the content inside and out, and I can relate to the kids.  But it’s intimidating too, returning to similar circumstances where all these horrible things happened to me and trying to avoid a repeat performance.  Truth is, I don’t think I could survive another bad school.  I really think that, if I wound up in another bad school, I would not be able to finish the year without having a nervous breakdown.

The future with all these scars is a scary place.  I’m proud of my scars- these are the proof that I have faced so many challenges and lived to tell.  But they also create a big question.  What will my career be?  I really don’t know.  That’s scary. There’s just no other way to put it.  I look at my bank account and I wonder, will it be enough?  What if it’s not?  What if I get sick, or have another car accident?  There are literally millions of what ifs.  What ifs are scary.

But then I look at my scars, and I remember: I lived through this other thing.  I have this scar to prove it.  If I lived through that, then I can live through this too.

To read my backstory, click here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8.

My heart goes out to the family of Natasha Richardson tonight.

I know I usually don’t write about or even pay attention to the goings-on of the glitterati, but this one is different.  This one is more than just a reminder of the fragility of our lives, how easily we can be snuffed out.  This one is a reminder of what I could have been.

Natasha Richardson suffered an epidural hematoma.  When I was in my car accident, I suffered a subdural hematoma.  Both conditions are equally dangerous and life-threatening.

I don’t know why I lived, or why Natasha died.  I won’t even try to make sense of this mystery called life.  I don’t think it is possible.  All I know is that tonight I am grieving alongside her family.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

I skipped prom.  Many people, when they found out I was not going to prom, would tell me (with an utterly foolish amount of shock) “how can you miss prom? it’s the best night of the best year of your life!”  I am VERY happy to say that my senior year was NOT the best year of my life, and I do not regret skipping prom one bit.  I had more important things to do that year!

I graduated high school, right on schedule.  I’ll never forget walking across the stage to accept my diploma- I had been told so many times that my brain injury would prevent me from graduating or ever doing anything academic, and I did it anyway.  That was a happy week.

I enrolled the next year at Central Missouri State University (now University of Central Missouri)- another of those things I wasn’t supposed to be able to do.  I continued to improve for several years.  I made the biggest gains in the first six weeks or so after the accident, but I am convinced that the improvements continued for at least three years.  In some ways they are still continuing today.  I guess I’m a case straight out of the medical journals- a recovery that can’t be explained.  Today I am as ordinary as the next 25-year-old, and looking at me, you’d never guess that I almost died when I was 17.  I drive, I work, I run errands, I shop- I do everything that a “normal” young adult does.  In fact, virtually everything I know about webpage design was learned after the car accident, which is positively phenomenal.

When I meet new people and tell them about my accident, without fail they react with shock and surprise, usually with some words like, “Wow, you must be thankful to be alive!” or “I bet you’re terrified to drive now!”  Yes and no.  Yes I’m thankful to be alive; no I’m not afraid to drive; yes, it was quite amazing that I survived; no I don’t think it is a huge deal.  It is so much a part of my life that it doesn’t shock or amaze me anymore.  God gave me this second chance at life, so now I try to focus on living in the moment.  Life is a gift!

I noticed below that a spam email got sent to my “secret” email address and published on this site.  Sorry about that… I will change my secret email soon.  Until then, I apologize if any more spam emails get through.

It’s been a great weekend- quiet but there’s definitely nothing wrong with that!  I’m working my way through a few PHP tutorials- I finally figured out the problem with the blog-by-email on my website, and I know exactly what I need to do to fix it- sorta!  I know exactly which function I need to insert into my wp-mail.php file- I just don’t know where in the file to put it!  But that’s okay, it certainly won’t hurt me.

At the urging of Jackie, I am returning to my series on my car accident (see the first part here).  I spent quite awhile typing up the series of posts today, and I’m hoping to publish one part each day this week.  I hope you all enjoy it, and I encourage you to ask me ay questions about anything at all- just comment and I will try to answer your questions in the next post.