(48): That Gray Instant When You Know You’re About to Die
One Friday afternoon, many long years ago, I was headed out from Tuscaloosa, Alabama for a weekend of fun at a science fiction/fantasy convention somewhere in Georgia. I never even came close to it. In fact, I made it about two blocks. Then the excitement happened.
Tuscaloosa is a dangerous city to drive in. When I lived there, just about everyone I knew had been in a car accident of some sort. My husband and I got our turn one Friday afternoon when we were completing a left turn from a busy highway to a slightly less busy cross street. A man and his buddy in a pickup truck sped right through the light as it turned from yellow to red, and at the same time my husband, seeing everyone slowing to a stop for the red light, began to clear the intersection. The truck appeared over the blind hill, going fast. The impact was probably about 55 miles per hour, impact being centered about 9 inches forward of the place where I sat in the passenger’s seat.
I remember screaming, and then there was a long, blank gray expanse, as if my brain had no memory to spare translating what came in from the optic nerve. If you ever watched Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (yes, the one with the whales), if felt much like the indeterminate quiet as the Klingon Bird of Prey manned by the Enterprise main characters ended the boomerang around the Sun backwards time travel maneuver. Whispers, quiet, nothing, then static and confusion and waking up.
When I woke up, we were upside down. Both of us had been wearing our seat belts so it was just a matter of getting out of them and kind of turning over to right ourselves. I think I crawled out through the window. At that moment, the adrenaline feed ended, and I realized I couldn’t get up. And lots of pain. I pulled myself to the curb with my arms. There was a small crowd cheering me on, including a guy who somehow climbed up a telephone pole to get a better look. My husband fared better than I did; he could still walk, but a bunch of the driver’s side window glass was embedded in his arm.
Once the full fist of pain in my right leg and hip hit my brain and festered there for a minute or so, I realized that, no, I’m not going to die. But, as the ambulance brought me into the emergency room X-ray area, I also realized that there is pain that would make me wish I was dead. So, my planned idyllic freak fest at the sci-fi convention became an up-close look at how things work in the Tuscaloosa emergency department on Devil’s Night, the night before Halloween.
Endnote: I had spent 6 weeks making a costume of Xena: Warrior Princess, and my helpful (able to walk) husband managed to salvage it out of the total wreck that was our Ford Explorer (yes, the picture above is our car — after). I attended a local bar’s Halloween costume contest on crutches the night after the wreck and had a pretty good time (in part because the Demerol I got at the ER kept me from crying in pain). I didn’t win, but you can’t have everything. At least I survived it. What’s more amazing is that everyone in the wreck — my husband, me, and the two guys in the truck (who had been drinking) all survived with relatively minor injuries. I was the only person who was unable to walk afterwards. The evening news carried the story of our wreck and opined that it looked like no one could have survived. By pure luck we all did.
