People Tell Their Stories:
Accidents

The Wreck  by Lyn
 
I was a few days short of turning 15 and it was 1960, a time when the range of "proper" styles and looks was so narrow that we dressed up to go to school. At that age and in that era, nothing mattered more to me than fitting in, especially because my family and I had moved to this city only six months earlier. And I'd been successful so far -- I was the class president, I had a date to go to a school dance that night, the next day I'd be going on a ski vacation with a friend and her family, and that day my friend Carol and I went boating with her older brother and his friend. After the boat ride, Carol and I went for hamburgers and talked about the dance that night. She had just gotten her drivers license and her folks let her use their old car. Life was going well.
 
On the way home after the hamburgers, Carol and I drove over the bridge. At the point where the uphill slope of the bridge begins, one of the tires had a blowout. At the moment she increased the speed for the uphill slope, Carol lost control of the steering wheel. Neither of us knew what to do. The car veered off to the right and hit a cement abutment. The abutment marked the beginning of an unfinished piece of roadway that would have been an exit from the bridge. The unfinished roadway jutted out from the bridge, 60 feet above the ground, and only a small "wooden horse" served as a warning sign -- or a barrier -- at the blunt end of it.
 
Later we found out:
 
The car hit the abutment going about 40 or 45 miles an hour. The car then spun onto the unfinished piece of road. The car stopped 6 feet short of the "wooden horse" at the end of the road. When the car hit the abutment, the engine was pushed into the front seat. Carol's jaw hit the steering wheel. Her jaw was broken, her neck was broken, and her windpipe was smashed. She was not breathing. The upper right side of my head hit part of the engine and my mouth hit the steering wheel. My upper jaw was fractured, my skull was fractured, my left leg was broken leg, both shoulders were broken, several bones in my face were broken, and I had a brain concussion. Cars stopped and people came to look. Much later, after we were taken to the hospital, my parents drove by and saw the wreck. They had not seen Carol's folks' old car, so they didn't recognize it. My father told my mother, "Boy, someone really got it. Not much chance of surviving, from the looks of the car." My mother inexplicably knew and began sobbing.
 
As cars stopped and people looked, no one did anything. One man, driving the opposite direction, pulled over. He was an Army medic. He cut a hole in Carol's throat, which allowed her to breathe. He asked the crowd to call the police and an ambulance. These were the days before cell phones, and it would have required someone to walk down to the road below to find a phone. "They're dead anyway" was the general response. The medic gave a dollar to a boy and asked him to hurry to a phone. The boy did.
 
I remember none of that part. My first memory is of waking up in what I thought was a Catholic school in my old neighborhood because I saw nuns walking past the door. I couldn't figure out why there were beds in the school or why I was in one. I screamed, "Where am I?" and in ran nurses, nuns, doctors, and then my parents. They asked what my name was and where I lived. I told them my name but I told them my old address. I told them I wanted to go home. They asked me what day it was. I told them the date of my boatride with Carol and her brother. The date they told me was three months later.
 
I had been in a coma for three months. They also had given me morphine, although I don't know if that was during the coma or not. Most of the time I had slept, they said, but often I would try to talk. I could say the words just fine, but I couldn't keep track of what I was saying. They said I also laughed a lot, especially when I couldn't remember what I was saying. My father handed me flowers on my birthday, and I liked them and thanked him. Then I closed my eyes for a few minutes, and he took the flowers back. When I opened my eyes, he gave me the flowers again, and again I liked them and thanked him. This went on several times, always with the same results. I was friendly, and seemed happy. But nothing stuck. I was nice to everyone, but did not recognize my parents or anyone else in the family in terms of who they were to me.
 
The brain surgeon had told my parents that he could try to lift the depressed part of my brain, but he couldn't guarantee the outcome. My parents kept putting the decision off as they watched me for signs of improving. It must have been a long three months for them. They finally told the surgeon to go ahead and try.
 
But the morning he was supposed to do surgery, I woke up on my own, thinking I was in the Catholic school in my old neighborhood. Much later, I found it that no one -- not even the surgeon -- could explain the sudden transformation. I was disoriented in terms of where I was, but I knew who I was, who my family was, what my old address had been. I remembered nothing about the accident or the last six months, although I did remember boating with Carol, her brother, and his friend. I spoke clearly, walked with no problems even though I still had a cast on my leg, and wanted to go home. I seemed to be the same as always, and it was a miracle. It was a long three days before they discharged me.
 
But during those three days, I faced what was for me the biggest problem: my head had been shaved because of the skull fracture and brain concussion, seven of my upper front teeth were gone along with the front part of my upper jawbone, and because I'd been fed intravenously for three months I weighed only 80 pounds -- two-thirds my normal weight. I had no visible teeth, no hair, and not much body fat.
 
I was 15 years old and looked 80. I was not only ugly, but death-like, skeletal, frightening. I had no self-confidence to fall back on, no history of having been beautiful, no assumptions that people would understand or be kind when they saw me, and no role models for what I had to do. Never before -- or since -- did I feel so alone, with so few resources. The day I came home from the hospital, my younger brother and sister were told what I looked like, but they really had no way to prepare themselves. As soon as they saw me, my brother threw up and my sister bawled. No one had any idea about the huge space I felt between myself and everyone else, the wide gap for which I had no words.
 
What I did have was a belief in God, and a good sense of humor. My belief in God gave me the stamina to let myself heal, to endure each step involved in living every day, to see myself in the mirror. My sense of humor did not, at first, seem relevant. But the first day I returned to school, feeling nervous and disconnected as well as ugly, I saw the crowd outside the building and suddenly realized that their reaction would depend on me -- how I seemed to feel, how I acted, what I expected from them. In a flash I realized that if I appeared to feel as bad as I looked, or if I seemed self-conscious or self-pitying, they would feel bad for me but would avoid me. So without thinking, I opened my arms, reached upwards, and shouted "Ta-DA!" as if I were a movie star -- a huge, self-exposing risk, although I did not realize it at the time. And everyone ran to me laughing, crying, holding me, saying "We're so glad you're back!" "Wow, can I feel your bald head?" "Hey, Gorgeous, look here!" And that became the theme. At school I smiled, laughed. I made it easy for everyone to be with me. And they returned the favor with lots of support. As my mouth slowly healed and I got an upper bridge, as my hair slowly, slowly grew back, my friends cheered and we celebrated. I was a good sport about how I looked, and they were good sports about looking at me. And my private pain, what I did not realize back then was my grieving for who I'd been, I saved for when I was alone.
 
I got the name and phone number of the medic who had saved our lives. I went to see him while Carol was still in the hospital. The doctors had put a trachea tube down her throat, right where he'd cut the hole that enabled her to breathe. I went to his house on the Army base, and met him and his wife. I thanked him for what he did, and asked about the details. The most powerful part of the experience was his unassuming manner. As I told him, tears in my eyes, how grateful I was that he had cared enough to stop and to persist in saving us, he smiled, shook his head slowly, shrugged his shoulders, and said, "Of course I did it. That's what we're all here for, to help each other." He was happy that I was healing, he was glad to hear that Carol was healing and sad that it would take her a long time -- but he refused to take any credit for saving us. At that moment, I knew he was right about why we're alive, and realized that there was only one way I could ever return his favor: to do what he had done, for others throughout my life. And I realized it was no coincidence that he, with such a loving heart, was a medic -- or that he had been crossing the same bridge when we needed him.
 
So at 15 I knew that my life was saved for a purpose: to help others. This mission became the thread that holds my life together. Every act, every goal, everything I do is for this purpose. This mission is bigger for me than the residual problems I have from the accident -- back trouble, phobias about mountainside roads and flying and elevators, insecurities about my looks, self-consciousness. These problems are real, and I work at them. But the bigger purpose drives me beyond them.
 
And sometimes I go back to the 15-year-old, to comfort her about what she missed out on. She needs it -- but she also knows, now, that her life will not be wrecked for long.

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