I wrote The Crash to try out my hand as an author. It has become a recent dream of mine to write a book, so this was an attempt to see how I would do at telling a story. Apparently I did fairly well, because the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. I can't give enough thanks to all of those who took the time to read the story and share their thoughts with me.
It was not at all my intention for the story to be emotional. I wanted it to be dramatic, and a little bit suspenseful. However, I did not want my audience to cry, but that is what almost every reader told me they did. Most people who read the story knew what happened. What I wanted to do was give them the inside perspective. They already knew what happened from their perspective. Dona and Little Johnny got into a wreck and Dona broke her back. That was the extent of the situation as far as most people were concerned. I wanted them to see the story from our perspective. I wanted them to feel our fear, and experience the turmoil that we went through. Although I wanted them to see it through our eyes, I did not think the readers would get so engrossed into the story that they would become emotionally affected. Thus, I must compliment myself on the level of detail put into the story, and my ability to allow the reader to connect with the author. I was amazed, and pleased, with the number of people who said, "I felt like I was in the accident with you."
With that being said, I want to follow up the story with this "note from the author." There was a lot of detail in that story. But looking back on it, and reading over it a few times, there are quite a few glaring omissions. The Crash, Part II will serve as my epilogue to the story I previously told.
My first fear was that people would not know who was at fault in this incident. After I re-read the story, I was happy to notice that I described the accident by saying the Suburban was in our lane bearing down on us. This would indicate that the other driver was at fault. And that was the case. I will admit, while I was sleeping and felt the brakes lock up and heard my mom express her expletive, I thought she had made a mistake and was about to run into someone. Shame on me because she has never caused an accident as far as I know. The driver of the other car was coming around a pretty intense curve, and with the roads being wet as they were, she had slid into our lane. My first thoughts were that she had lost control. I gave her the benefit of the doubt. She had come into the curve too fast, with the roads slippery, she slid into the opposite lane. I thought it was an innocent mistake, an accident. I thought that if there was anything she was doing wrong, maybe she was texting.
Well, I was wrong. It wasn't an innocent accident and she wasn't texting. She was drunk. That is the first glaring omission from my story. But I don't regret leaving it out of the story. I wanted to give the reader a detailed account of the incident and her being drunk had no effect on the way I handled the situation. I didn't find out until days later. The hospital tested her blood and got results of .15% which is almost double the legal limit to be driving. And those tests were done about an hour after the accident.
There are a few other intense details that happened on scene which I could have included in the story but did not for no reason that I can explain. While I was talking to the 911 operator (and she was asking so many damn questions) the woman who was first to arrive on scene ran over to me and said, "the lady (the driver of the other vehicle) said 'where is my son, is my son OK? My son was in the car. Where is he?'" The operator heard this and said, "Sir, did I just hear that there is one more person involved in the accident?" I was blindsided by this so I said I didn't know. The operator asked me to find out. I went to the passenger's side of the Suburban and opened all the doors. I looked front to back, side to side, top to bottom. I looked under the seats, and under the vehicle. I ran around and looked in the ditches. There was no kid to be found. I told the operator exactly what I had found: nothing. The persistent voice on the other end of the line kept wanting to know if there was a kid in the car, and my response was, "If there was, he was thrown too far into the woods for me to find him." Once again, maybe I wasn't the best at being sensitive in this situation, but my mother's well-being was the one and only concern on my mind. Come to find out, the driver of the other vehicle had just dropped off her son at her mother-in-law's house less than a mile away. Thank goodness that the young boy didn't have to go through what we did.
As I was getting into the ambulance I saw the fire department walking over to the Suburban with the "jaws of life." I had never seen them before in real life. Every time I heard someone had to be cut from a car with the jaws of life, I knew it was serious. Well here I was walking away from an accident that needed the jaws of life. One of them carried the huge cutters, and the other toted the generator to power the scissors. I already knew both cars were totaled; I knew the head-to-head collision was bad; I knew we were all physically wounded; but it was seeing the jaws of life that told me this accident was no joke.
As I mentioned, I want this to serve as a view into the mind of the author. I am not trying to tell a story here. This is my epilogue. I am telling you what I left out of the original story, and giving a behind-the-scenes look into my thought process. However, if there is one part of this where I would expect you to gasp, this is it. As you already know, my mom had a broken back. Because of this, necessary scans were performed. The results of these scans is what truly makes this story amazing. The doctors found a tumor on my mother's kidney. It took months of tests and consultation to decide that the entire kidney should be removed. However, the surgery was so physically demanding that it couldn't be done with her spine in its current condition. Four months of recovery was deemed enough for the surgery, so in April 2010 she was re-admitted into the hospital to have her kidney removed. We didn't know if the tumor was malignant or benign, but because of its size and given the circumstances it was recommended that the entire kidney be removed. The biopsy results showed that the tumor was cancerous and if it wasn't caught when it was, who knows how far or fast it would have spread. The wreck that could have killed my mother saved her life. Call it ironic, call it luck, call it fate. I don't care what you believe in or what you call it. My mother had gone through living hell and she is still here to talk about it; that's all I care about.
The tumor and the resulting kidney surgery was just a reason for us to say, "what can go wrong now?" Little did we know, we were just four months into the most hellacious year of our life.
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