It was a good morning. Nice weather puts me in a good mood. I was definitely sick of winter at this point. I left MTSU feeling happy and excited. I liked teaching a lot, and hoped to do it more. I had a long drive ahead of me because at that time Tom and I were living in Pleasant View which is northwest of Nashville. Its was a little over an hour drive, but I had become used to it, driving back and forth everyday. It was around 1:10pm when I was driving through Nashville. Normally around that time on Fridays traffic isn't too bad, but for some reason there seemed to be a lot more cars on the road than usual. Driving through Nashville is a pain. Three main highways merge together (24, 40, & 65). It gets a bit chaotic if you don't know where you are going, trying to find fix lane to stay in or when to change. I was past all the main buildings in Nashville, right before Thompson Lane exit, where 24 and 65 sort of merge together for a couple miles. I was aware of all the cars around me, because I knew I evenutally had to get into the left hand lane to stay on 24, but I had plenty of time so I was going to wait a bit for a more open space. I had the radio on some top 40 channel and they were playing some rappy hiphoppy song that I didn't really know, so I wasn't singing along like I normally do with the radio.
I didn't see my car get hit, but I sure did feel it. I felt my tiny little car move over and I knew instantly that the tracker trailer next to me had hit me. One second I had complete control of the car. And the next it was gone. I don't think people realize just how frightening it is to lose control of your vehicle unless it has happened to you. You don't think about it when you do have control, but theres a huge ease knowing that when you move the wheel your wheel are going to turn, and when you hit the brake your car is going to slow down, and when you hit the gas, the car goes. When you don't have that control, you feel completely powerless. You are a slave to the road and all you can do is hang on and hope that it will either stop or you will gain control again. You can hold on to that wheel, slam your foot down on the brake, but its all for nothing. The laws of physics win in the end.
I was across the two lanes of traffic before I even realized it, and when my mind did finally click into place I saw myself falling down the medium. You ever go sledding and go down a hill and have your sled go completely airborne and then slam back down into the snow? It was more like that, except it was a much larger form of transportation and the ground didn't have the same impact that snow has on a sled. I slammed down much much harder and that's when my airbag exploded. Everything was very loud. Of course, because I pretty much free fell down the medium my car was still going... into oncoming traffic. This is when I knew I was not going to survive. I assessed the situation and came up with the only thing I thought possible, which was that this was it for me. In that split second I was upset because I didn't want to go, I really thought it was unfair to die that young. My life didn't flash before my eyes or anything, but I was very aware that I was going to die.
I braced myself as I saw the first car slam into me, and then really felt the impact as the truck hit me next. I felt the pain from the impact, it was horrible, and I felt my car spinning. All I could think was please let this stop, and please don't get hit again, because I didn't think I could take another hit. And then, by some miracle, the car stopped.
The whole incident was probably a total of three seconds, but it felt like an eternity.
At some point I must have closed my eyes out of total and utter fear and I to fight the feeling of wanting to just keep them closed forever. Because once i opened them I knew that it would all be real, and not some sort of insane dream I was having. When I opened them all sorts of realization hit me at once, 1) A chunk of my hair was lying on my leg, 2) I could move neither of my legs, one was trapped by my steering wheel and the other one, well... it just wasn't budging, 3) I had glass all over me and there was blood coming from somewhere, and 4) my passenger side was just... gone. This is when I started freaking out.
I looked over to my left and saw a man running toward me. I'm pretty sure he was the one driving the truck (not the semi, but the truck) that hit me third. He asked me if I was okay, and I think I said, "ya, ya I'm fine," but clearly I should have been saying, "hell no, i'm not okay". He called them cops and some woman from somewhere came over. She asked if I could call anyone. I sort of broke down at that moment because I realized that I had NO ONE to call. I didn't really have any friends at that time, and my whole family is in Mass, and Tom was in Virgina on training. It was irrational, but my first thought was, "who is going to pick me up from the hospital?" At that moment I raelly hadn't assessed the severity of my injuries, I think it was the shock. The woman tried to calm me down and asked for peoples numbers anyway and for the life of me I could not come up with a single number. It was like my mind of completely blank. Somehow Tom's number popped up and I had her call him because I knew that he could call other people. Then the man who called the police came over and asked if there was anyone else I could call and I remembered my dads number. Once the woman got Tom on the phone I started crying. The whole thing was just insane and I had no one and I wanted him to be there with me so bad. He must of asked her how I was and she totally downplayed it and said I was fine, which I wasn't. Well, I guess later on that caused problems when he was relaying news to the rest of my family because he's thinking I'm fine, and my dad heard that I was so not fine, so I guess everyone was very confused.
There seemed to be a group forming around my car and I was getting mad because I heard them saying that it was because I had a blow out and that I caused all this. I was not going to be blamed for this because I knew it wasn't my fault. And like I said, I was not thinking rationaly at this moment and it was really upsetting me that people would think I caused this all. So I said, "I got hit by a truck! He didn't see me and he tried to change lanes!" And then some other lady looked over and saw the semi on the other side of the highway that had pulled over (because he hit me!) and started saying, "omg, she's right, there's the truck!" I don't know, after that I ignored all those crazy people except when someone took a picture. It was very odd, but then I remembered that if I was him and I had my camera I probably would have done the same.
I heard the sirens and was relieved because I wanted desperately to get out of the car. Some very nice fireman EMS guy came over. His name was Cory and for some odd reason he reminded me exactly of Ben, who is my friend my Mass that works on the firedepartment with my stepdad Paul. This made me happy, because Ben always put a smile on my face. He asked me if I was okay and what was bothering me and he relayed back to someone that he thought my leg was broken. That was not a surprise to me. Although I thought they were both broken at this point because I couldn't move the left one because it was trapped underneath the steering wheel. The right one was not trapped but I couldn't move that one either. They put this horribly uncomfortable neck brace on me incase I had some spine injury or something ( I really came to hate that neck brace in the next couple of days because they never took it off!).
There was lots of people around working on me and trying to figure out how to get me out of the car. They used the jaws of life to cut the steering wheel off me. Then they cut the seatbelt off me because for some odd reason I did not think to undo it myself (that seatbelt saved my life, btw). Next came the really fun part. And when I say fun I mean the most painful thing I've ever been through in my entire life. Have you ever had a broken bone? Well, I had never before this, and let me tell you, I never really knew pain. You can't know it until you've felt it. Cory looked at me and said that this was going to be the hard part, but it would only last a minute and then they'd get me to the hospital. Well, the whole shock thing definitely wore off. They had to pull me out of the car, but because of my injuries and the way the car was so messed up, they had to pull me back through the back passenger door. Let me tell you, this was no easy feat. I screamed, a lot, it was just the worst possible feeling in the world. Words will just never describe that agonizing moment. Never move a broken bone like that. You should just NOT do that.
I pretty much cried from relief when they finally got me into the ambulance. Let me just say this right here, there is absolutely no shame or pride involved when you are as hurt as that. They told me they had to cut off my clothes then and I didn't even care. Okay, that's not true, I cared that they were ruining my clothes. I had on all new stuff that I had gotten got Christmas. A purple sweater, a really nice pair of jeans and my new beautiful purple victoria secret bra. I honestly asked him if he had to cut that off and I think he thought it was because I didn't want to be naked or something, but that was totally not what I cared about at that moment.
The ride to Vanderbilt didn't take very long. Cory asked me to rate my pain 1 being like nothing and 10 being the worst pain I ever felt. I said 10, since it was definitely the worst pain I've ever felt. But before then I had had a pretty lucky life. Never broken a bone or anything like that. He told me not to be worried but when I got to Vanderbilt they were going to take me into a large room and there would be A LOT of people around me. I guess whenever there's an accident of that severity they have to do a special 10 people check up or something, I don't know. But he was right, when the rolled me in it was like chaos. There was so many people and they had to move me again unto a real hospital bed and that sucked, but it didn't take as long as getting me out of the car. But then they kept rolling me to vaccum up all the glass and I wanted to yell and scream again because it hurt so freakin bad. There was craziness going on for quite some time and the whole thing is honestly all a blur. Eventually they were rolling me to a different room to get an MRI and X-rays. The MRI wasn't bad, and didn't take too long. But then came the x-rays, and this was definitely the closest that I got to really yelling at someone during this whole experience. These children were idiots. Honestly, they were like children doing my x-rays. Some med students who had no idea what they were doing. They had me holding up my very broken leg (which again I cannot describe the pain of movement) and then they couldnt get the freaking thing to work. My leg was in so much pain that my muscles ended up spasming out and then they had to do it over again. I hated them, I really really hated them at that moment.
Eventually they took me back to that large room and things calmed down a bit. Although I was very confused because many people kept coming to check on me and I had no idea who my doctor was. I noticed that I still had glass stuck in my hands and asked about five people if they could get it out. They kept saying that they would have someone come do that but no one did. I also um... needed a female product but they didn't have any. I'm sorry, what kind of place doesn't have any female products? That's messed up. (that turned out to not be a huge problem because my body had gone into shock and my period just stopped, kinda interesting). Anyway, no one was listening to me and I was getting a little annoyed. Finally some very good looking young orthopedic surgeon came in to talk to me. I believe he was my main surgeon assistant or something, I'm not really sure how hospital politics go. He told me that they would have to do surgery on both my femur and my ankle. Well, this was the first that I've heard that my ankle was broken. I didn't even feel that. The pain in my femur completely blocked out the pain coming from my ankle. Dr. Kahn, my surgeon, came in a little bit after his assistant had left and told me all about the surgery and how they would be sticking a metal rod in my femur to put it back together and put two screws in my ankle to hold that together. He said if I only had the femur break it wouldn't be so bad and I wouldve been mobile again pretty soon, but because of my ankle he didn't think I'd be able to walk for another 6-8 weeks.
6-8 weeks? WEEKS? As in, TWO MONTHS? What about school? Hello, I was just getting started into this semester, I couldnt just take two months off. I started freaking out again. This stupid accident was ruining everything, all my plans! He told me that he was going to try to get my surgery in tonight and then left me to stew about all by myself.
This really nice social worker came in and got my mom on the phone for me. She was freaking out, but her and Paul were at an airport and were flying down to see me. That made me feel a lot better, I didnt want to be alone. When I hung up with her I got to talk to Tom and he was working with the red cross and the social worker to try to get out of his training a couple days early to come home to be with me. There was a little bit of trouble because we werent married and I wasnt dying, but eventually they gave him permission to leave in the morning so he planned on getting there by the next night.
I told some nurse that I had contacts in and she reccommended I take them out before the surgery. Problem, there's still glass in my hand and theres no way I am sticking my fingers anywhere near my eyes with that. So finally someone came and cleaned out all the glass in my hand, and what do you know, they say that I should have gotten stitches, but because they waited too long they could no longer do them. Thanks a lot, now I have a nice scar on my hand (not that it really compares to the other scars... still, it was avoidable!) I asked the woman if I could have somethink to drink because I was really really thirsty and she said no. I thought she was kidding. Nope. Apparently you can't eat or drink if you are having surgery. That whole concept seems totally stupid to me. Everyone needs water! She turned off the lights and told me to get some sleep before my surgery.
I had no idea what time it was. The whole day was just... well, crazy, and time had kept slowing down, speeding up, and I had no sense of it. I laid there, tried to close my eyes, but I couldn't sleep. Everything started sinking in at that point. I almost died. And the scarier part was that I almost died alone. The whole alone thing really started bothering me. I didn't want to sit there in the dark right then alone. I could feel the tears coming and my breath getting shallow, and I'm pretty sure that what I was having was a slight panic attack. My monitors started making strange beeping sounds and a nurse rushed in and told me to calm down and to take deep breaths. Somehow I calmed down but I didnt fall back asleep.
They took me away to go to surgery. I was in some other room with the anesthesiologist and he told me they were going to move me to another table. I asked if they would wait till I was passed out for that (I really wanted to just pass out so I didn't have to feel the pain anymore), and he jokingly said no. Except I didn't know he was kidding and I started to cry anticipating all that pain again. He noticed I was crying and quickly reassured me they would not move me till I was fast asleep. He gave me the stuff, had me count back from twenty and then...
... I woke up somewhere completely different. I couldn't open my eyes but I could hear. I heard my mother talking to someone (probably my doctor) but I was just so happy to hear a familiar voice and know that I wasn't alone anymore. I said her name and she came over and then I asked if I could finally have some water and they gave me some ice chips. I remember munching on them, and then I close my eyes...
... And again woke up somewhere complete different. This time I was in a room. The nurses came to check on me every hour, so I never really got any peaceful sleep. Plus my mom and paul were sleeping in the room in very odd places.
Honestly, the next few days were a huge blur. Tom came the next night. At one point I was all alone again and I had another panic attack. A couple days after the surgery I noticed that there was still glass all in my head, and oh wait, every completely missed the huge gash in my head where a chunck of my scalp and hair came out. How they missed that, I dont know, lol. Tom and Paul went and investigated my car and managed by great force to get my purse out of there. They would have to tell that story because I don't really know the details, I just know that it took a lot of effort.
A physical therapist came one of those days and made me finally get out of bed. Ya... that was awful. She made me us crutches to try to get to the bathroom; I probably made it three feet. I never realized how something so easy like walking to the bathroom could become so difficult. I just couldn't do it, my body didn't have the strength. Over the next couple of days I practiced more and more till I was eventually getting there on my own.
I got to leave the hospital 4 or 5 days after my accident. I was very happy to leave. I was really sick of that place.
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