Motor Vehicle Accidents

It was the summer I was hated. Living in North Carolina, where they still called it the War Between the States, my Yankee accent stood out. Pending my schedule I trained as a community organizer by day or went door-to-door canvassing money for social change in the evenings. To pay my rent I worked a rotating schedule as triage receptionist in the Emergency Room. I was the one asking your name, address, and insurance, asking you to spell things for me, telling you to move your car out of the ambulance bay.

I was on a blind date, a week short of turning 21, when the Triumph I was riding in crashed into a light pole on the Bronx River Parkway. My date thought the car was burning and rushed around to pull me out; the door was locked, and by the time he got back to the driver’s seat he realized the car with spewing steam, not smoke, so he just held me still.

When the ambulance got me to the hospital, it turned out I had jackknifed over the lap belt and broken my back.

The constraints of traditional marital roles put Rita at a disadvantage when she was unexpectedly widowed in her 80s. Finances, cars, and home repairs had been her husband’s purview. But Rita was determined to learn to manage her own affairs, despite her grief.

Her learning curve was steep and her missteps frequent. She initially needed reminders not to pay bills set up for autopay. Duped by scammers, Rita had to cancel credit cards and open new bank accounts a few times. After learning the art of the screenshot, she frequently texted photos of mail to her daughter with a query: “Scam?”

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.

We were coming home from a band clinic, and I was riding in the car with the band director’s wife and son. The son was a couple of years older than me, and he was driving. We were all sitting in the front seat of one of those big, 1950s cars. We stopped for church, and afterwards his mother asked to trade places with me. I moved to the middle of the front seat, and she moved to the right. That’s the last thing I remember.

Karma is the idea that the universe is ruled by cause-and-effect associations: that actions have consequences,  good or  bad. My mom instilled in me the idea that sometimes you need to be the voice, the conduit, for karma.

Years ago, I was indirectly hit by an impaired driver. This person hit the car behind me, and that driver in turn hit me. We could smell the alcohol on the impaired person’s breath. The police were called, but the police officer was reluctant to take the driver in question to the station for further testing, because there were no beer bottles in the car and they could walk a straight line.

The other injured driver and I tried to reason with the officer, pointing out that maybe the impaired driver had been drinking at a friend’s house or a bar, and that was why there were no bottles in the car.

When your life truly flashes before your eyes and you think, “This may be it—my last moment on planet Earth,” it is not a cinematic moment. There is only spinning. The sharp scent of gunpowder. A tree directly ahead. An airbag that hits you square in the face as you think, “Death by tree.”

Then everything stops. There are gurgling sounds and dusty smoke.

For a second, I wondered if I was waking up in heaven. Then came screeching sirens and flashing lights.

“Ma’am, are you all right?”

It was December 1975, one month after I gave birth to my daughter. I had spent that month in a sleep-deprived state as I cared for her and my two-year-old son. I was also suffering from postpartum depression, a diagnosis not yet a part of the medical lexicon.

Most of all, I felt imprisoned. It was too cold to push the babies in the double stroller, and we did not live near enough to any indoor space where I might find an outlet for my locked-in feelings. That was why I convinced my reluctant husband to watch the children so I could go for an early-evening drive.

Dear readers,

I grew up in New York and have lived and worked in and around the city my entire life. Some news outlets and politicians like to paint big cities with a broad, scary brush, so that many people think that New York subways are a dangerous way to travel, akin to taking your life in your hands.

Statistics prove that there are far more dangerous ways to travel, and that’s been my lived experience, which is this:

I can name five relatives, all under twenty-five, who were killed in motor-vehicle accidents.