I am so very lucky. It’s hard for me to say it, but it’s true. I was a privileged little shit growing up and didn’t know it. I knew too much about my parent’s money problems to appreciate we had a nice suburban home and cars to take us to school. They weren’t brand new Lexus SUVs like other people had, and we didn’t have a pool, and I couldn’t just ask for money from my parents to spend at the mall, but I was still pretty lucky.
At sixteen something Bad happened to me. Even with this shadow following me around, my life is still a lot better than most. I didn’t really suffer that much, I tell myself. It’s not a big deal and you should get over it. God blessed you and protected you so you can be with us today, people told me. That makes me sour. Most people that say that don’t know that my parents raised me without God and without religion. They are believers to an extent, it was just never a topic of discussion, and church was a place I was unfamiliar with.
Instead of a bible, I was given a book about space written for kids. Around five years old, I went to my parents crying about something I read about our sun. Our sun is a star that will die like other stars of its kind, expanding and engulfing Earth before it shrinks again. My mother told me that it was okay, because everyone would be dead by then, and humans probably wouldn’t exist anymore. So it’s all pointless? Nothing matters? It was my first existential crisis. My second came with the Bad thing.
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“What’s your phone number?”
I couldn’t see the woman asking, I could only hear her voice. I was staring up into the night sky, flooded with yellow light from the street lamp.
I recited it. “What are your parents’ names?” I spelled them out as I told her. Why is she asking me this? She must be checking to see if I’m cognizant, if I can remember things. I need to remember. I need to remember everything. I need to remember it all right now. I spelled my name. I told her my birthday. Could I remember my street address? Yes. What about my school’s? I knew it. 3000 Los Rios. What about the school’s phone number, where my mom worked? I remembered that. I reached into the corners of my brain for any random piece of information I could cling to, to prove I knew it. I had to prove I wasn’t brain damaged.
If I could be brain damaged, I could also be paralyzed, I thought. I started moving each finger and each toe. I realized a shoe was missing. This was extremely concerning.
I didn’t realize she had stopped listening to my recitations of addresses, teacher names, and classes. Men started asking me more questions. I couldn’t see them, either. I started asking questions of my own. I repeated them over and over. “What happened? Why aren’t you telling me?” One man, near my head, said, “She’s repeating it,” to the man near my feet.
“I KNOW!” I shouted. “You’re not answering me!” They didn’t say anything to me. They continued talking to one another. I kept asking about my shoe.
One placed his gloved hands on my head. My skull was touching the pavement. He poked inside to see if it was still intact. I felt him touch my skull. To this day I can feel it. “There’s no excess brain matter on the ground. The brain appears intact,” he told his partner.
I gave him a thumbs-up. “That’s good.”
By now I knew I was in the road and an accident had happened. I’d forget again soon. It was as if I’d awoken on a beach at low tide. A wave of awareness would come in, crash around me, and the cool water and salty air would remind of where I was, but it receded quickly. The waves started to come in faster intervals, lingering. By the time I was in the hospital, it was high tide, but even then, but remembering is like peering through a thick fog, and I reach landmarks in the wrong order.
They put a neck brace around me and slid me onto a backboard, secured my head, and strapped me down. Even as they put me in the back of the ambulance, I still wasn’t quite sure what was going on.
It was Danielle’s seventeenth birthday party. We celebrated at her house, and left to go hear a jazz band at our favorite coffee shop in the car her parents gave her that day. It was a steel grey Volvo sedan, a 1986 model 240 DL. It was older than me. We left the show to drop Wendy off and cruise around town. Wendy still had a 10:00 curfew, but the rest of us had been allowed to stay out until midnight. Danielle needed to turn left into a neighborhood.
At once, I was at home, going upstairs to my bedroom, and falling asleep. I dreamed I was sleeping on a floor. A hard, cold, concrete floor.
My mind was fighting what happened, trying to shield me. I started to realize I was on the freezing cold ground, but I didn’t know why. I was so cold my shivering looked like convulsing. Someone asked if I was having a seizure. Paramedics put a heated, paper-thin blanket over me. The ambulance was bright and there were at least three paramedics helping me. My shoe was placed on the stretcher. I asked one his name. Brian. I realized I couldn’t speak very well. One picked up my right arm to put in an IV; I turned my wrist to see my hand, and it was black with blood. Another, at my feet, placed a mask on my face, grimaced, and pulled it away. It was ringed with black.
“What’s wrong with my face?” I asked. He just stared at me.
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I have no idea how long the ride to the hospital was, but I was furious. They cut my jeans off. My favorite pair! I have a curfew! Winter exams are next week! I started screaming all of this at the nurses as they wheeled me into a room with curtain dividers between patients. I needed to go home! Let me up! I passed under a metal machine, and saw my face in the reflection. I was covered in blood.
My parents and brother were there. I don’t know when they arrived. The doctor came over and introduced himself. His name was Honaker, and it was around the start of the holiday season, so I referred to him as Dr. Hanukkah the entire night. He produced a pair of long, skinny silver scissors. He cut my upper lip off. That’s why I couldn’t talk very well. As I rolled and skidded down the pavement, my lips were smashed into my braces. Nurses took my contacts out, and used tiny brushes to clean the glass from my ears and eyes. Dr. Hanukkah was behind me. “Mom, come over here and see this,” he said. My mother later said her knees buckled and she almost fainted at the sight of my exposed skull.
A female nurse sat by my head and told me that they were going to try and staple my head shut. They may have to sew it, though, and if that happened, they’d be forced to shave my head. I begged for the staples. The thought of losing my hair – even temporarily – was too much to bear. A male nurse said, “Mom, if you want to cover her up, we need to remove her clothes.” “I don’t care,” I drawled out. They cut everything off - except my socks, I could keep those. I was still pissed about my jeans. As they pulled my shirt and jacket away, I saw they were soaked with blood. “At least you’re wearing cute underwear.” My mom was not helping.
It felt like I had lain there forever. My back was searing with pain from the board. “My back hurts!” I would wail every so often. The medical staff would freeze, and hammer me with questions about the pain. I would tell them it’s not broken, it hurts from the back board, take me off right now I swear to God I will kick you if you don’t take me off right now! They didn’t care. I really was not capable of kicking them, anyway.
Hospital staff wheeled me away. I told one of them liked his Caribbean accent. Passing under the fluorescent light tiles so fast made me sick. I was put in a room with a big white plastic ring. They injected me with iodine. Told me to hold my breath. It took all of my strength; in between images I pleaded with them to stop and let me rest. I felt like Hercules after chasing Diana’s hind.
They took me back to the room with curtains, and the time crept so slowly it felt like days. My back was on fire. I overheard the people on the other side of the divider. “We just got back from Indonesia, and now he’s really sick and we don’t know what’s wrong,” a mother said. Great. I’m going to get the Indonesian flu from this kid.
Eventually, they came back and said I was fine. They slid me off the back board and leaned it against the wall. It was covered in my blood. They made me get up to take a drug test. I couldn’t even lift my head off the pillow. My mom and a nurse were on either side of me, like you would help a staggering drunk, and carried me. I was handed a plastic cup and put in a cold bathroom. It was humiliating. Without my contacts I could only see vague colors and shapes, I couldn’t hold myself up, and now I had to pee in a cup? Why? I wasn’t even driving. While still strapped to the back board a police officer came in to speak with my mother. I shouted at him that we had the green light. It wasn’t Danielle’s fault. She turned left on a green. Now I had to be drug tested?
At some point, I got to leave my curtained area again. I was able to walk a few steps on my own. As I emerged from the curtain, a woman gasped and her eyes widened. It was starting to hit me how bad I looked. I went to Philip’s room, where he was still unconscious.
They had to clean my face. I waited until the rest of this piece was finished before writing this part. It makes me tremble. It makes the scar in the back of my head throb. It makes me feel like I did in that triage bed - helpless, defenseless. Imagine burning your inner forearm, and scrubbing the damaged skin with steel wool. I was not even capable of crying or screaming. I just whispered to please, please stop. I weakly held up my wounded hand to my face, as if that serve as protection. It took forever. Getting the dirt and gravel out of my skinned face was delicate work, but it felt like a lawnmower passing over me. The nurse doing the work – her name was Amanda – told me they were going to give me more morphine.
“I can’t have that.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she snapped back.
She called for more and more doses. They had no effect. I bet a cow would be keeled over with all that they ended up pumping into me. I felt nothing. No pain relief, no high, no drowsiness. My father had kidney cancer a couple of years before. He too, had zero reaction to the morphine after surgery to remove one of his kidneys. My grandmother needed something else following a blood clot. We’re not allergic…we’re just immune.
Fuck you, Amanda.
They slathered Neosporin over my burns and put bandages over my face and hand. That’s it?
“But if your brain hemorrhages, come back,” the nurse said as she told my parents I could go home. I was terrified. How will I know? I don’t want to go home. I want to stay here in case that happens! They assured me it would be fine. I just had to be woken up every hour for a couple of days. I was never even admitted to the hospital. Thrown through a car windshield, and spent only hours in the emergency room.
I was put in a wheelchair and taken out to my father’s car. They put me in the backseat, on the driver’s side. The same spot I was sitting in just a few hours before. I panicked. I didn’t understand why I was so upset. I screamed at my dad that he was going too fast. He needed to slow down. I couldn’t handle being a car. I wouldn’t be able to for months without a panic attack.
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At home, I couldn’t get up the stairs to my room, so my parents put me in their bed to watch over me. I couldn’t lay on my side, but the back of my head hurt so much I couldn’t lay on my back, either. I was in this awkward position with my head turned for weeks. Days passed before I could get out of bed on my own, without sliding to the floor.
The next day, I heard my father on the phone, calling family and friends to tell them. He came to my bedside and said, “Now it’s going to feel like you got hit by a truck. You will probably have scary dreams.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” I slurred.
My hair was matted with dried blood.
A neighbor came to see me. He is a firefighter; he responded to the scene. He didn’t treat me, Victim Number One. He didn’t know it was me until my parents arrived at the scene. He turned away from them. He couldn’t tell them. My family couldn’t find me. My dad saw the pool of blood in the street, and realized it was where I’d lain. He turned my mom and brother around and put them in the car to go to the hospital.
My mom said she knew where I was because I was screaming at the nurses. That’s me. I look sweet, meek, and librarian-like, but I’m a fighter when I lose my inhibitions.
The woman who asked my phone number was a passerby that came upon the accident right after it happened. She almost ran over me. She turned her SUV sideways, to block the rest of traffic. She thought I was going to die right in front of her, so she did the only kind thing she could: call my parents so they could hear my voice one last time, so they might make it to the intersection in time to see me again.
My mom answered, and could hear me talking. My recitations of facts. She thought I was fine, sitting in the car or on the curb, speaking to the police. But they weren’t there yet. There were so many accidents that night a far-away station had to respond, and the response time was slow. It was why Alan my neighbor was there. His station was across the highway from the accident site.
I couldn’t wear contacts or glasses, so I was blind during my recovery. I can only make out blurs of muted colors. People sent flowers. The scent of Stargazer lilies filled the house. I’ll never buy a bouquet of Stargazers again. I pulled glass out of my teeth. A few friends came to visit. They told me I looked fine. Kim, Melisa, and Aly only visited once. My parents didn’t know Aly; she was Danielle’s friend. She was in the front passenger seat, and the only one uninjured and mentally capable of calling 911. She ran back and forth between me and the others in the car. I asked her what happened. She told me I was fine, that nothing was wrong, in between screaming through the phone to dispatch to hurry up with the ambulances.
Danielle turned left on a green light, but the oncoming car was going between 70 and 80 miles per hour. That stretch of Parker Road, at Roundrock, is 40 miles per hour. We screamed at Danielle to go because she hesitated. None of us could judge how fast he was going. I remember a singular, huge yellow-white headlight, and screaming.
Wendy was sitting at the point of impact. Her door was ripped from the vehicle. “If you weren’t in a Volvo, you’d probably all be dead,” someone told me. I don’t really care; I don’t think I’ll ever buy a Volvo. Philip was thrown, unconscious, from the open door. He was sitting between Wendy and me. And me? The first time I remembered the event I had never lost consciousness during was over a year later. When I snapped out of the flashback, I was in my bedroom and unable to remember how I’d gotten there.
I was thrown first into the back of the driver’s seat, then catapulted out of the rear windshield, landing on my head and shoulder, and skidded and rolled down the paved road. I haven’t truly been able to remember the event with the same level of clarity since that flashback. I’d had other recollections before that; laying on the pavement, the paramedics, the hospital, and even hitting the ground. My senior year, during an Economics exam, I replayed hitting the ground over and over, hundreds of times. I still do that. I don’t know how I did on that test.
Portrayals of Vietnam vets having flashbacks to combat in movies and TV confuse me. Mine aren’t like that. They are silent and unnoticeable. Sights and sounds dim out, and I can’t focus on anything but the images in my head. Mine might not be as bad because my trauma wasn’t as bad – it wasn’t prolonged, and my friends didn’t die in my arms.
I skidded on my right side for a long time before I started to roll. I flipped suddenly, like that moment you finally snap your head around to spot while pirouetting. My arms were out in front of me, unable to stop my body. It’s why my right hand and the right side of my face were most damaged. My right eyes was red from burst blood vessels for a long time.
Danielle was the only one to visit more than once during my recovery, when I couldn’t leave the house. I think it’s because she felt guilty. I don’t blame her for the accident. It was just that. Plus, I was the one that chose not to put my seat belt on. As we left the coffee shop, I ran to the rear passenger side, changed my mind, and sat behind Danielle. When I couldn’t dig the seatbelt out from underneath the seat, I didn’t care. She shouldn’t have felt guilty, but I understand it. We played Hungry Hungry Hippos, because I was too blind and immobile to do anything else. I just had to hit the little pedal with my left hand to get my orange hippo to eat all the marbles.
The Monday after the accident, my mom put me in the car and took me to the doctor. Another panic attack. He gave me a tub of Silvadene. The mask was to stay on my face until it flaked off naturally. I couldn’t move my facial muscles and could barely open my mouth to eat. That mask saved my skin.
I missed finals, but I had winter break to recover. By the time school started, my skin was pink and crossed with scars, but it was grown back without a skin graft, and I could walk around alright and wear my glasses. People stared. People even gasped, like the woman in the emergency room the night it happened. People whispered around me, and talked a lot of shit behind my back. A student in my English class asked if I got in a fight. “Yeah, with the pavement. I lost!” I choked out my rehearsed joke.
A few months after the wreck, I pulled a chunk of glass out of my scalp from a little wound that wouldn’t heal.
A teacher asked me what was wrong with my face. A year later, she’d be my AP Government teacher, and she couldn’t figure out why I didn’t like her. Being a sixteen-year old just got a lot more painful, but I retreated toward that pain. I hung onto my wreck like a safety blanket. It became my excuse, my shield, my abuser, and my only friend.
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If I wasn’t happy with my looks, I blamed my accident. If I was rude, antisocial, or just plain mean, I blamed my accident. It’s taken me a long time to admit I clung to it and used it as a crutch. It’s still really easy to slip back into that mindset.
I’m reminded of that night nearly every day. I can drive to work without having a panic attack now, but I’m still hyper-vigilante. I see my crooked lip line, forming a permanent Elvis-like snarl, in the mirror every day. Some days the small scars around my right eye are more noticeable. Sometimes the scar in my head hurts for no reason; new type of headache.
I had reconstructive surgery at 19 to reduce the scars, and remove a stubborn piece of glass from my eyelid. Most people don’t notice my scars. Those that do are obnoxious assholes about it.
I lied a lot about my recovery. I quit dance, horseback riding, and stopped practicing and private lessons in orchestra (see, I was a privileged little shit). My art teacher suggested I try out for AP Studio Art. I shrugged it off.
I didn’t seek therapy. I read about cognitive behavioral therapy, and forced myself to drive and get in the car even when I didn’t want to. I desensitized myself to the fear so I could be in a vehicle without screaming and hyperventilating.
I didn’t dare tell my parents I was having flashbacks and wanted to die. Sometimes I still want to die, but I remember the fear I felt. I don’t really want to die. It’d kill my parents. I just want the pain to stop.
Making friends is actually easy. Keeping them is tough. I’m kind and empathetic, but I’m angry and bitter and yell at people in public I like because I perceive they’ve slighted me in some way. I find people and all their flaws too tiresome to deal with after a while. I’ve never had a job for more than a year. I think I become exasperated with them, too. I graduated with my Master’s degree on the tenth anniversary of this wreck. I’ve been able to accomplish a lot since that night everyone was so afraid I would die. It doesn’t match my ambition, though.
A lot of people in the conservative suburb I lived in told me that God saved me. “You’re so lucky!” God didn’t bless me and deem me, of all people, worthy enough to survive this and not be a vegetable or paralyzed from the neck down – I think that’s bullshit. I’m told I should feel grateful. Gratitude is hard for me, but that’s that bitter shield again, a toxic friend.
When I feel sorry for myself I remember it could be so much worse. What I went through wasn’t really that bad. It’s just another shitty thing that happened to me, like so many shitty things that happen to kids all over the world. There’s more suffering in this world than my sensitive heart can handle. My Bad thing is not keeping me forced on the ground with my hands behind my head, letting life pass by - that’s me doing that. Getting up and letting it go is a daily choice. I fail at that a lot. I can’t leave my house some days. I’m afraid to take risks. I turn down parties and vacations. I’m afraid to go for the jobs I always dreamed of.
Yes, I am so lucky. I just don’t understand how to not throw all that luck away by feeding the shadow of this Bad thing that’s still stuck to me.
