by Tim Sommers
Where you are, death is not. Where death is, you are not. What is it that you fear? –Epicurus
I knew I was in trouble as soon as I saw them. They were driving one of those huge pickups with four back wheels instead of two – what I now know is called a “dually” – and they kept drifting to the side of the road, hitting the rumble strip, and then jerking back into their lane.
It was early June, Old Mine Road just east of Litchfield, Illinois, late on a Friday. I was working as a courier out of St. Louis and I had just completed my last run of the week, intravenous medication for a little girl on a farm, one of those runs that makes you feel okay about what you do, and I was heading back to St. Louis.
It was a clear evening so I could see these guys from way off, drifting then jerking, drifting then jerking. The problem, my problem it turns out, was that this was a two-lane road with a sixty-mile-an-hour speed limit, no shoulder, and the roadbed was raised about four feet or so above soybean fields on either side. Furthermore, we were coming up on a stretch of road hemmed in on both sides by guardrails. I actually considered driving off the road to avoid them. I pictured my conversation with my insurance agent not going well, though.
I slowed a little and drove between the guardrails. They drifted again and hit the nub end of the guardrail head-on. The back of their truck rose into the air and all four back wheels came off and spread out across the highway like hellfire missiles. I sped up a little and managed to drive under a tire coming straight at my windshield, then I hugged the guardrail as tightly as I could, but the truck was upside down now sliding across the pavement on its roof, sparks flying, and I was out of room.
(A policeman who interviewed me a few hours later, even before it was clear whether I would live or not, insisted the truck was not upside down. “People don’t remember things after trauma like that.” I said, “Why are you talking to me then?”)
Then it hit me.
Every pane of glass in the car exploded at once, my airbag deployed, and the car went through the guard rail becoming airborne and knocking a four-by-four post into the air so that it spun in front of the windshield like a helicopter rotor. As soon as I saw it, I thought, “That’s going to come through the windshield and hit me in the face.” Then it came through the windshield and hit me in the face.
Let me pause, with the car in midair, and give you a partial catalogue of my injuries. When the truck hit the side of the car it crushed my foot breaking most of the bones in it and it broke my leg in twenty-three places including three compound fractures, while somehow also pulling the top part of my femur out of my hip socket and sticking it in my a**, which my orthopedic surgeon seemed to find hilarious later on describing it to me, me, not so much. (In his defense, he was the only doctor I encountered in any of this that had any discernible sense of humor at all, and he saved my leg.) I had countless lacerations from the broken glass and so much glass embedded in me that it took a year for the last of it to come out. I would get these little bumps that looked like pimples, only if you popped them glass came out. Oh, also, when the airbag deployed it broke several of my ribs. And when the guardrail post that came through my windshield, I partially deflected it so it didn’t hit my face full on, but it broke my elbow and my arm in six places, broke my wrist, and drove my arm into my face so hard that later I became (temporarily) blind from traumatic cataracts.
The car landed about thirty feet from the road steaming and smoking and the post that had come through the windshield was partially embedded into the passenger seat with other end hanging out the driver’s side where the windshield used to be. Somehow it looked like a comfortable place to rest. I laid my head down on it and went to sleep.
I woke up to a woman smacking me in the face repeatedly. I pushed her hand away. “Wake up!” she insisted. I sat up spitting glass then and tried to wipe it off my lips and gums, but I was so bloody and I was too tired. I decided to go back to sleep.
Smack. “Listen. I am a nurse. I saw the accident. If you sleep, you die.”
“I’m not even hurt that bad. I just have a cramp in my leg.”
“Well, your arm is broken. I can see that.”
“No, it’s not,” I said, holding it up. “See?” It was sort of floppy with an extra elbow. “Oh,” I said. “OK, you’re right about that. It’s my leg that really hurts though, I think it’s a cramp. Help me open this door so I can stand up.”
“No. You are just going to hurt yourself.”
“I feel a little weird,” I said.
“You’re in shock.”
The next thing I remember is that there were sirens and lights and firemen and EMTs. The women was gone. I never saw her again.
An unshaved face came through the window. “We’re going to hose the vehicle down first to prevent a fire.”
“Hey. Take this. I don’t want it to get wet.” I passed him my cell phone. I thought for a second. “Call my Mom and tell her what’s happening. The number is in there.”
He took it and stood next to the car. While it rang, he whistled and motioned to the trucks to bring the hoses. I heard my Mom come on the line, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. “An accident, yes, ma’am. I am really sorry to have to tell you this, but I don’t think he is going to make it.”
“Hey,” I said, “give me back my cellphone.”
The hoses came on and it was too loud to hear myself much less anyone else. The hot metal hissed and groaned as the water hit it, then dripped on me and pooled on the seat. The water was cool. Nice. That was when I started to cry. I remember thinking my tears would mix with the water and no one would hear me over the sound of the hoses. I wish it were more profound than this, but what I remember is just feeling really sorry for myself at that moment. I knew even if I lived it would be a long, long time – if ever – before things would be alright again.
It took two hours to cut me out of the car.
They tried to get me out the driver’s side, but my leg was embedded in the door like I was trying to make a snow angel, and they were cutting and burning my leg right along with the door. I kept yelling, “You are hurting me!” Finally, they pulled the post out through the windshield and started on the passenger door instead.
An EMT said to me, “We are going to have to just yank you out and across the seats. It’s going to be bad.” And it was. When they pulled me out, I knew for the first time with clarity and absolute certainty that something catastrophic, apocalyptic even, had happened to me. (The apocalypse is relative. It can happened to just one person, if that person is you.)
So, then I was in an ambulance. The road was bumpy and I kept crying out. We went over railroad tracks, and I must have been very loud. An EMT told the driver to stop while he examined me and checked my vitals. He didn’t say anything, until he turned towards the driver and then he said, “He’s not going to make it. Call a helicopter.”
I tried to be companionable. “I always wanted to ride in a helicopter,” he shushed me.
There seemed to be a lot of people carrying me to the helicopter. I thought it was six. Probably, just four. “I always wanted to ride in a helicopter,” I repeated to the person above me. She took off her helmet and said, “Shut up.”
Despite always wanting to ride in a helicopter, when it took off from the ground straight up and fast, I was afraid for a moment. Then I chuckled a little. Out loud, I think. What was I afraid of? Being in some sort of terrible accident?
That helicopter ride was 18 minutes long and it cost $23,000.
As we swooped to land, I glimpsed the gold dome of the State Capitol for just a second, the last few rays of daylight glancing off it, then we landed on the roof of the parking structure next to the hospital.
When they wheeled me under the red “Emergency” sign I said to no one in particular, “Oh no, the emergency room on a Friday night, we’ll never get in!”
Someone said, “Don’t worry, sir, you’ll have priority.”
And I said, “Yeah, I know. I’m injured, I’m not brain dead.” Another paramedic shushed me.
There was a lot of shushing of me that day. I remember when I was a kid and Ronald Reagen got shot, and I didn’t like him, but I admired the way he joked around the whole time. I always thought that if you were in an accident, or whatever, you were expected to show your courage by joking around. This is not the case. You are widely discouraged from joking around. One doctor even said, “You need to settle down and conserve your strength. The odds are quite slim that you will live to see morning.”
I said, “Where did you learn that bedside manner? Andersonville?”
When they wheeled me through the waiting area a man looked down at my leg, turned, and loudly vomited into a trash can. “Thanks for that,” I said. It took weeks to make the mistake of looking at my leg.
I waited ten hours for the surgery without any pain medication because my vitals were low and I had a subdural hematoma. My brain was bleeding.
I learned something that night. I learned that you can take anything for five minutes. Then all you have to do is do it again. And again. Twelve times is an hour. One hundred and twenty times was that whole night.
Two different orthopedic surgeons came into look at my leg. They both said that it was beyond repair, that it would have to come off. Then someone I couldn’t see said, “Guess who’s coming up?”
“Oh, no, not him,” the doctor from earlier said. “Just tell him, no. What’s he even doing at the hospital at this hour?”
“He wants to look.”
The doctor came and stood over me. Later he looked and sounded almost comically arrogant to me, so I understood why they disliked him. But that night he glanced briefly at my leg, smiled at me, and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll save your leg.” And I liked him very much and do to this day.
“Get some final pictures,” he said to the others and walked out.
“What am I? His nurse now?” someone said.
Seven minutes later, two x-ray technicians came in to take a final set of pictures before surgery. One said to the other, “We can’t use the digital machine because he doesn’t have insurance.”
To which the other technician replied, “It’s been a long night, I don’t think he can take the pain of doing it all manually.” Then she paused. “Fuck that,” she said. “Tell them it was me. I made you do it. Use the digital.”
I wish I knew who that woman was. Because that is probably the second nicest thing anyone has ever done for me in my whole entire life.
Call that, day one.