March 2026

I almost didn’t survive the accident that I can’t remember. It was New Year’s Eve, 1979 and my parents, both nurses, were headed home when a drunk driver ran a red light and T-boned their car on the passenger’s side. Their dog was frightened and ran away. My mom was taken to the hospital to evaluate for internal injuries. My dad was not harmed, but he stepped in a jar of honey that was broken in the accident. At the hospital, he remembers squishing and sticking down the cold, clean tile floors to get to his injured wife.

It was late afternoon on the day of the winter solstice in 1983, and my car had broken down on the freeway. The damp, gloomy weather and encroaching darkness were textbook precursors of what was to come. I, and the friend who was with me, had walked to an emergency phone to call for roadside assistance, and we were walking in the emergency lane back to the car when traffic suddenly slowed.

A speeding van swerved into the emergency lane to avoid colliding with the car in front of it—hitting me instead. There was a loud thud as my body dented its bumper. The force of the impact propelled me upward; my forehead smashed the van’s windscreen before I ricocheted off the vehicle. My friend watched me fly through the air and land like a rag doll in the grass. The whole event unfolded in seconds.

The way I learned as a pediatric resident was by doing.

One night, during a neonatal rotation at the county maternity hospital, my call partner and I were paged for a “Code Blue” in the pediatric treatment room. I arrived after my partner. She looked at me over the nurse’s head and shook her head. No hope.

The boy had blood coming out of one ear. He wore an oxygen mask. The nurses were attempting IV access.

The boy’s parents were at the door, watching.

“What happened?” I asked. My partner said the boy had fallen out of a van on the freeway. The father had pulled over, run back, picked him up, and brought him to the hospital.

A motor vehicle accident (MVA) changed my mother’s life forever, and maybe my life as well.

When she was 16, my mother, as a pedestrian, was hit by a drunk driver who went through a stop light. She had such a severe compound fracture of her femur and tibia that she was in traction for three years: in the hospital, her leg hanging in the air from pulleys, for three years when she was 16, 17, and 18 years old. We don’t do that to patients anymore. She also had multiple surgeries during those three years: for pinning; for osteomyelitis; and for skin grafts—which left 4-inch-square scars on her “good” thigh where skin was removed to cover a 3-inch-square divot in her “bad” leg.