Irreversible Impact

It has been twenty-three months (as of this writing) since I was trapped in my 1993 Honda Accord. After Binga (the car's name) bounced off the back of a dump truck's wheels and went airborne, at 65 mph, I went out-of-body. She spun clockwise, before landing soundly on her roof, rolling over the ground again and again and again. Binga eventually landed upright but drooping, partly on the freeway's shoulder and partly on the grass. With the transmission still in drive, her engine was revved up. A fellow traveler, who happened to be a stock car racer in his recreational life, pulled over immediately. Risking personal injury but likely preventing a fire, or worse, an explosion, and reaching precariously through the passenger side window, he turned the engine off. The roar of sounds stopped. Binga had burned her last drop of gasoline.

After Binga was removed from the crash site, she looked like this:

I owned Binga for only 18 months. When I relocated to Door County, WI, in June of 2017, I soon discovered I could not get around on my bike as easily as I could in the Washington islands I had left behind. Through acquaintances of my new employer, I learned this Honda Accord was available, and that she came with the name given by her original owner. Until the day of our shared trauma, Binga had led a pampered life, I can assure you! She cruised scenic byways in the summer months but remained snuggled in her private garage through the winter months. She had only 81,000 miles on her when we became road companions. In the end, and according to the state trooper who investigated my crash site, Binga had protected me with her older, more heavily built 1993 frame.

The trooper, who redirected traffic while the paramedics worked to free me from the wreckage, told me the next day that twenty 911 calls about the crash had been received in the first five minutes! Rescue vehicles began arriving about fifteen minutes after that.  I have no memory of of that part of the rescue. I was in an alternate reality that made me feel safe and loved. I felt no pain. I experiences zero anxiety. I was, however, surrounded by and immersed in a vibrational, music-like hum that was unlike anything I have ever experienced before. But it was eerily familiar in a way I cannot really connect the dots on.

Gratefully, I met the young stock car racer / earth angel, two days later, while I was still in ICU. I had been transferred to my second hospital and the young nurse happened to be a close friend of the stock car racer. They had been in high school together. I was in good hands but this is what I looked like: 

According to initial emergency medical records, it took the paramedics over an hour to extract me. When I came back into my body, a female medic was shouting at me not to move. She was holding towels to my head and said, "You have been scalped! Do you know what scalped is? You know, like in the Westerns...." I faded out. And when I faded back in, she started to ask me a staccato of questions: "What's you name? Do you know what happened? Do you know where you are? What day is it?" Everything was painfully LOUD. I had a hard time opening my eyes because everything was also painfully BRIGHT.

I had bitten though my tongue. It was swelling. It was impossible to talk when I did regain my in-body consciousness. I answered the medic's questions but I feel pretty sure I was slurring the few words I did manage to say. 

My body was still securely restrained by my seatbelt. The lead medic, who had gotten inside the car from the passenger side, was pulling the airbag away from my face. He started asking me to do things:  "Can you wiggle your toes for me? Great! Can you bend your legs at the knee? Wonderful! I'm going to need to turn you so we can get you out, but you need to help a little. Can you push up when I unlatch the seatbelt? On the count of three!" 

I pushed. They pulled. The door and me went together. I blacked out. 

When I came to, I had been placed on a gurney, surrounded on all sides by medics. Trying to keep my eyes open for more than a few seconds was hopeless. I barely glimpsed the hands using the scissors that was cutting off my favorite blue dress. I remember thinking, do they really have to do that? Really? My favorite dress was saturated with the blood from my head wound but I couldn't see it. Very soon, the feeling of being vulnerable and exposed was replaced with the miracle of soft, warm blankets being placed over and around me. The gurney straps were then pulled over and tightened. How safe that made me feel! But I kept trying to open my eyes. I even managed to ask one of the medics: "Why is everything so bright? Why is everyone being so loud?"

He told me: "You probably have the mother of all concussions and whiplash." Then, a brief exchange between the medical team members hovering around me took precedence.  The question posed to the lead medic was "are we loading her in the Heli or the ambulance"? I wanted to yell "not the heli! Not the heli!" because they can be rather rough under the circumstances. As if reading my mind, the lead medic answered, "the ambulance...the Heli's gonna be too rough!" And the slow, cautious push toward the ambulance began.

The highway trooper came near to my gurney, introduced himself, and without preamble, asked me to give him a statement about what happened. Well, I might be able to say my name and the date but to say what happened was going to be too much. Much to my relief, the lead medic tersely yelled "f--- off officer! You can see her tomorrow at St. Vincent's!" This is going to seem odd, I think, but I started to laugh a little - which hurt. that was the best timed and most relevant F--- you I ever witnessed. But the ridiculous expectation that I could possibly speak intelligently through a swelled tongue and bloody mouth was just too funny. I wasn't in denial about how badly I was hurt.  I'm very sure I couldn't have said a clear word at that point, even if my life depended on it. Even more weird is that I laughed as if the trooper had told a joke. And laughing even a tiny laugh - in that moment - was the enormously painful prequal to the avalanche of hardcore pain that was about to overtake my central nervous system.  

And just then I remembered that I needed to get a message to the prison in De Pere -- that I had been in a crash. That couldn't make my six o'clock visit with an inmate. My frustration only increased as I realized no one could understand what I was trying to say. In my head, I was saying "Dar-ren! Dar-ren! Tell him I'm sorry I can't come in today..." but it came out of my mouth as groans and bloody spit. I recall trying to give the phone number of the prison but the numbers were too difficult to form with my wounded mouth. I must have sounded garbled to those who, in trying to make sense of what I was saying, wore expressions of confusion, shaking their heads with incomprehension. Stacked against me as the moment was, I had no breath to yell, nor the  capacity to articulate anything clearly. Any effort to explain my involvement in a prison ministry would be futile. 

For the forty-four year old black man, who had been in prison since he was seventeen, the visit of a fellow artist was something to look forward to. But on the day of my crash, all Dar-ren got to meet was an empty chair and a silent table in the common visiting room. As far as he was concerned, I had stood him up. It would take a full week before another member of the visiting team would get a message to Dar-ren that I had nearly died on my way to see him. It would take three months of recovery and physical therapy before I managed, while wearing all three spinal braces, to limp into the prison facility, go through the screening process, fail the metal scanning procedure, and, by the skin of my teeth, obtain a one hour pass to meet up with Dar-ren. When he saw me that day he instantly understood that I had really, really, really been hurt and had struggled to get as far as I did. In fact, the prison officials had informed me that they would deny me a future entry until I was no longer wearing the support braces, which had enabled me to be able walk and stand.

But I have gotten ahead of myself. Going back to the wreck, and getting loaded into the ambulance, it was the moment in which I was lifted up and jostled into the vehicle that the pain hit me for the first time. A searing jolt, like a bolt of lightening or a surge of electrical charge came from the middle of my body, and split me upwards and downwards simultaneously. It forced me to cry out involuntarily and that was frightening. That would have been a good time to die. 

But I had already decided to live.