Life Changing Car Accident − 5 May, 2007
In spring of 1984, I was employed as a Legal Assistant at Perkins, Coie law firm in Bellevue, Washington, east of Seattle. Being recently divorced, a neighbor and I were on our way to dinner. I was a passenger and the driver was going too fast for the road conditions. It had sprinkled slightly with rain over an oily back-country windy road. He was driving a 240Z and we were laughing and looking forward to the evening. The speed limit was probably 35 and we were doing around 50mph. The car hydroplaned, flew 40 feet in the air and left the roadway flying past tall evergreen trees. It suddenly landed face down in a ravine, about 200 yards down an embankment. After several minutes, I woke up. I was facing backwards. My right knee had gone through the dashboard and was crushed. The back of my head was pressed into the rear view mirror and the tool box which had been resting in the back of the car had flown forward crushing my chest. By sheer luck a trucker was behind us and saw the accident. He called an ambulance crew who crawled down the cliff to rescue us. The driver regained consciousness and was not hurt in any way. He helped to get me out of the vehicle, despite my broken leg.
At the hospital they had to do major surgery on my leg, doing a bone graft from my pelvis. There is a stainless steel plate and four bolts in there, which I never had removed because they did not know if the repairs would last or even if I would ever walk again. The recovery and physical therapy is not anything that I would wish on anyone. It took three months to "recover" and I immediately left my job and returned to college knowing I would someday be in a wheelchair.
This "near death" experience changed my life. I did not see any light at the end of the tunnel nor did I feel afraid in any way. There is a kind of quiet nothingness. You do not have time to have your life "flash before your eyes" and the realization that you made it and came out alive gives one a sense of gratitude for life itself. I now live everyday like it is my last, and I do not mean by that wine and song. I take people, nature and time seriously and spent the next 20 years attending as much college as I could, reading every book I could get my hands on (school helped me pick the best of the bunch), attended church and studied all about God (and sharing God), and traveling all over the world. I went to Europe with my undergraduate classmates and to Israel on a study-abroad during graduate school. Playing the stock market during the heyday of the 1990s helped me travel to Hawaii, and writing online paid my way on a Mexican cruise. Knowing my ability to travel would be limited by my future inability to walk and other mobility issues made me all the more passionate to go-go-go. I love the outdoors and camping and go on road trips every chance I get. I have lived along the Pacific Ocean and adore the beach for vacations.
The experience taught me several things. One, drive carefully and always wear a seatbelt. Two, you never know what may come tomorrow, so make the most of today. Be ready to meet your maker at any time. Also, I am a big believer in insurance (the settlement from the car accident helped me to afford returning to school and to travel) and now I invest for my grandchildren in insurance rather than only dote with simple gifts. By having been an older, returning student - single mother - I believe I inspired in my own daughters the value of a Liberal Arts education. I say Liberal Arts because books, music, art, science and the nontangible things in life are just as important as the tangible. I try not to own anything of value which owns me, (if you know what I mean), so that I am free to go where I want at any time and spend money the way I want to. I never remarried because I do not wish to answer to anyONE other than myself and God. If you wish to know how my studies affected my philosophical thinking, you can go to my writing sites at Suite101.com, Associatedcontent.com, Epinions.com and Helium.com.
