Jill and I had dinner in the city with her friends Tam and Mac on Wednesday night. I had just finished teaching my pro bono class in the Mission District, and met the three of them at the restaurant. We had a very nice meal, and then I drove Jill back to the Daly City BART station, which is where I'd left Bubba.
Jill drove off, headed for home, while I waited a few minutes to check email on my phone, and allow Bubba to warm up. It was raining for the 3rd consecutive day, and it was unnaturally cold, so I wanted to give Bubba time to get properly warmed up. At nearly 120,000 miles, he was not so sprightly anymore.
Thus, by the time I headed out, I was probably 10 minutes behind Jill. I drove home on the PCH as I always do, and I was deep in thought, mostly on autopilot, as I passed through central Pacifica, near the exit for Sharp Park Road.
Unbeknownst to me, a hail storm had passed through the area shortly before. It's hard to convey how unlikely that is on the coastside. The temperature just doesn't drop that low, ever. Even in the dead of winter. Jill had gotten caught in it on the cliff road, where CHP was forcing everyone to drive slowly, and was placing patrol cars at the most dangerous sections of road.
I was unaware of all this, and, as I said, was just headed home on autopilot, doing approximately 45mph (the speed limit) on a mostly straight section of road.
Jill sent me a text saying the road was icy from the hail, and to be careful. I never got that text; it probably arrived one minute too late...
As the road started to gently curve, Bubba's back end started to fishtail. Startled out of my reverie, I turned the wheel into the fishtail to prevent the car from 360-ing. I succeeded in preventing the 360, but the car lost traction with the road and slid to the side. Since the road is very narrow there, I almost immediately hit the curb. I remember hitting it, and the car jumping upward. Then, suddenly, the car slammed to a stop.
All I really remember is that there was a loud bang, and the car suddenly stopped. Then I was bent over in the seat, with a pain like I've never felt before shooting through my chest. I couldn't breathe. The car was tilted toward the passenger side.
I was somewhat hanging by the seat belt, which I managed to disengage. My only thought was to get out of the car. Still doubled over, I reached over and pulled the door handle.
It wouldn't open.
I started to panic a little. I still basically couldn't breathe. I was breathing in the shallowest, shortest little breaths possible, and it was nightmarishly painful. I pulled the door handle again, but the door seemed stuck. The panic level started to rise. Finally, I pulled the door handle and rammed the door with my shoulder, which caused it to dislodge, and I managed to shove the door up and out, and I sort of spilled out onto the running board. I sat on the running board, still doubled over, trying to take in air, but in so much pain I still could only take tiny, tiny, super-short breaths. It felt like I was on the edge of suffocation.
In a few seconds, I could see a couple people come up to me. One guy leaned over and asked me if I was okay. I sort of nodded, but said I was in a lot of pain in my rib area. He said he'd been behind me and had seen the crash, and had already dialed CHP, and that they were on the way.
Because so much CHP had been nearby on the cliff road, they showed up in less than 5 minutes. The ambulance showed up less than 5 minutes after that. What followed was a lot of different people asking me different questions, while the EMTs tried to figure out if I'd suffered any brain or spinal injuries, and the CHP officers tried to sort out exactly what the accident had been.
As for me, I tried to answer questions as best I could, doubled over and clutching my side, while sitting in the cold rain more or less unable to breathe. At some point, one of the guys standing around me said, "We should probably turn the car off." It turns out that the engine had never actually stopped running. I took that to mean that I should do it, and tried to turn around to reach in and grab the keys. However, I only managed a slight twist before gasping in pain, and whoever it was that had made the comment in the first place said "Don't worry- I've got it!" and shut it off.
Finally, the EMTs decided it was time to move me, and they placed me on a gurney. Getting onto that thing was excruciating, and once I was lying down, I felt even more like I was about to suffocate. They placed an oxygen mask over my nose, but that had the effect of increasing my panic level about suffocation, and I ended up sort of holding it a little off my nose, so that I could still get air from the outside.
Meanwhile, I was still getting a lot of questions from both the EMTs, and from CHP. The CHP officer in charge was trying desperately to fill out an accident report before the ambulance whisked me away. However, because he had to keep waiting for openings in the interrogation that the EMTs were giving me, it was slow going for him. By this point, I was asking everyone who would listen if they would please get my cell phone out of the car, because I needed to call my fiancee. However, no one seemed to be in the mood to listen to any request of mine, and I was worried that we'd drive off without it. I knew Jill would soon be worried when I failed to show up at home, and I wanted to try and head that off and let her know I was okay, at least in some macroscopic sense.
Finally, one of the EMTs came by and said "Uh, we couldn't find your phone.. there's a lot of glass and stuff in there." That completely failed to register, and I tried to explain that it was in the cupholder right next to the driver's seat, but then he left, they slammed the doors shut, and off we went. (With the poor CHP officer forced to glumly give up trying to get his form filled out.)
The ambulance ride to San Francisco General Hospital was, by my estimation, almost 3 weeks long, and definitely the most painful experience of my life. By the time we finally arrived, I was having thoughts like "I'm not so sure I'm glad I survived this." Every little bump or turn reverberated in my ribs, which I didn't need any doctor to tell me were broken, and I could barely breathe, and the oxygen mask, which was meant to make breathing easier, mainly made me feel like I was suffocating. They took me to SFGH rather than the tiny urgent care place in HMB, because SFGH is a Level 1 trauma center, and the EMTs were worried I might have neck or spinal injuries.
When I finally arrived at SFGH, there was no room for me, so I spent some time parked in the hallway wondering just how long the suffering was going to last, and wondering if Jill was freaking out yet. It's hard to say how long I was out in the hall; I'm not good at measuring the passage of time even on my best of days. But since the hospital was so packed that my final destination was the equipment supply room, I don't think it's just my imagination that I was in the hall for quite some time.
Eventually they did park me in the equipment supply room, and a very nice nurse named Jamie dosed me with morphine, which, I have to say, is both more and less powerful than you might think. It is quite powerful in the sense that it takes the edge off the excruciating pain, and if you're in that kind of pain, taking ANY edge off it is really quite a relief. On the other hand, it doesn't actually make the pain go away completely, or even mostly. It just dulls it to the point where you don't necessarily wish you were dead. It's not obvious to me how one gets addicted to it, but I was only on it for one night.
Pretty soon after they put me in the room, a social worker came in and asked who he should call to explain about my situation. Fortunately, I have Jill's cell phone number memorized (helpful life hint: have at least one emergency contact number memorized, in case your cell phone gets destroyed), so he took that down and left to call her.
And so I lay there on the table, trying to breathe.
And lay there.
And lay there.
And lay there.
Aside from Jamie checking on me, the only thing that happened for a while is that one of the other nurses kept having to come into the room to retrieve various pieces of equipment- not really surprising, given that this was the spare equipment room. The reason this particular detail sticks in my head is that my bed was in the exact center of the room, and each time she came in, she needed equipment behind my bed, and then in the process of getting it out from there, she banged it into the corner of my bed. For me, I'd come to a place where, with the morphine kicked in, I felt the pain/discomfort was manageable as long as I didn't move in any way. So when she'd bang a large piece of rolling equipment into my bed, the reverberation made it as though someone was stabbing me in the ribs.
The thing is, I could have lived with it happening once. But she came in like 5 times in an hour, and she banged into my bed literally EVERY time. Thank god she went into nursing, and not, for instance, selling fine china.
When Jill arrived, I felt a mixture of 90% relief and 10% mortification. The 10% mortification part was mostly what I'd thought about in the loooooong ambulance ride home. Remember, at this point I still had no idea that the car was totaled; I assumed I'd probably caused a couple thousand dollars damage to it- ruined a tire, bent the front fender, etc., probably negating what we might have gotten in selling it. Since Jill's mom had just offered 3 days prior to give us her old Prius, we'd decided to sell Bubba and use the proceeds to help pay for the wedding. Thus, I felt that I'd probably freaked Jill out, plus stupidly squandered an easy opportunity to defray some wedding costs. It was embarrassing, and I was prepared for her to be pretty upset with me.
Which, she wasn't. She was very sweet, and immediately set up next to my bed and began interrogating Jamie whenever she came in the room. Within minutes, Jill was the unquestioned queen of the equipment storage room, and Jamie had her keep an eye on my oxygenation monitor, with instructions to find her if it dropped below a certain level.
By that time, I'd had a number of scans and such, which had revealed multiple broken ribs (duh), but also a minor lung puncture that did not *appear* to be big enough to cause my lung to deflate, but which they wanted to keep me overnight to monitor. If my lung started deflating, they would need to do an operation to insert a chest tube.
Sadly, keeping my blood sufficiently oxygenated required consistent breathing, which still ranged from enormously uncomfortable with morphine kicked in, to excruciatingly painful when the morphine wore off. Jill stayed up all night watching the oxygenation meter like a hawk, periodically forcing me to breathe whenever it fell below the minimum threshold. That's how we spent the entire night.
In the morning, at about 7am, the doctor came and decided that I was probably not in danger of lung deflation, and could go home. He gave us a prescription for percocet and sent us on our way. The drive back to HMB naturally took us right by the scene of the accident. As we approached, we could see where I'd impacted the tree. About 3 minutes later, I had to ask Jill to pull over to the side of the road so I could spill out of the car and dry heave. I think this was the first time I started to get a sense of the gravity of the situation.
When we finally got home, Jill helped me climb into bed, a process which underscored just how painful absolutely every basic motion was going to be for a while, and I tried to sleep. Jill went to go find my stuff in the car, which had been towed to Daly City. She was gone for a while, and when she returned, she burst into tears upon seeing me. She'd arrived at the towyard, asked to see my vehicle, and been pointed toward one end of the yard. "I don't see it," she said. "There. Against the wall," the guy pointed. Apparently she'd passed right over it, because she wasn't expecting to see this:
That was when it really hit me, how close I'd come to actually dying. It made a lot more sense, in retrospect, why the emergency responders all kept saying that night "I can't believe you walked away from that."
Socci was due to arrive at the house that evening, and the rest of the NYC crowd was due the next day, so Jill set about spreading the news of the accident. She asked me if I wanted her to tell them not to come, but the last thing I wanted was for this to stop everyone else from coming and having a good time. All of them ended up offering not to come, but hey- the wine-tasting weekend extravaganza happens rain or shine, incapacitated host or no incapacitated host.
In the evening, Socci showed up, and he and Jill got the place set up for the others, and Jill started laying the groundwork for the dinner party Saturday night. Meanwhile, I continued to lay in bed in a percocet-induced haze; the only exception was that I did a skype tutoring lesson from my bed. God bless the internet for making such things possible.
It was a bittersweet moment when everyone showed up Friday night; I was happy to see all my NYC friends, but sad that I couldn't so much as get out of bed to welcome them. Getting in or out of bed was an extraordinarily painful act; I quickly learned to roll over onto my side, and then kind of fall out of the bed onto my feet. I couldn't push myself up without straining my ribs; it turns out that almost any kind of motion of your upper body involves your ribs. These are the kinds of things you never think about until something is broken.
Socci had, sometime over the last year, befriended a local group of Italian old men who got together to play music at one of the local eateries. They'd had need of an accordion player, so he'd taken it upon himself to learn the accordion. And, had taken to it quite quickly- so much so that the old Italian dudes had bestowed upon Socci the nickname "Tommy Squeezebox". Socci brought the accordion with him, so I got to listen to him regale everyone into the night with songs on the accordion. It was fantastic, and a surprisingly great thing to fall asleep to.
Tommy Squeezebox!!
The next day I was determined to have the dinner party happen, so I managed to get out of bed and help Jill do the preparations. Truthfully, she did 80% of the work, and we simplified the menu somewhat since I wasn't going to be very much help. But, we still managed to put on a dinner party in the spirit of our tradition. L came and joined us, and brought along a most delightful gift: a cake, with a roadway and a racecar on the top, to which he had added a broccoli tree and a little Aladdin figurine he borrowed from his girls, which he laid out next to the roadway with strawberry jam clumped around Aladdin's head. He'd had the baker write the wrods "Stop running into trees" on the cake. It was hilarious; here's a picture of it that Alison took:
The most hilarious cake I've ever had.
Upon unveiling the cake, Rose spontaneously altered the "happy birthday" tune into "happy alive day", and everyone sang it to me. It's hard to say how awesome it is to have such great friends, particularly when you're going through a time like that.
Good food, good drink, good company.
After a long, awesome meal, and much great wine (or so I'm told- I wasn't allowed to mix wine and Percocet, according to nurse Jill), everyone turned in, and we got up the next day to head to wine country. We'd tried something new, and instead of all getting hotel rooms, we'd rented a house in Napa. That turned out to be a brilliant idea; the house had a pool and hot tub, and plenty of space. Thus, although the trip up to Napa was not easy for me, I was able to go straight to bed and sleep for a few hours while the rest of the group went wine tasting. We had dinner reservations at Ad Hoc, which is Thomas Keller's (of French Laundry fame) other restaurant in Napa. NO WAY was I missing that, broken ribs or no broken ribs.
Sure enough, Ad Hoc was everything we'd hoped it would be. The food was absolutely out-of-this-world good. I could barely keep myself up in the chair for the entire dinner, and there were times when I wondered if I would make it (I hadn't gone such a long time without lying down to take pressure off my ribs since the accident), but it was well worth it. Great food is such a delightful experience.
The next day, the NYC kids did an entire day of wine tasting, hitting 8 wineries. That's commitment, let me tell you. Our experience of the previous year, when we'd all gotten totally wasted hitting just 6 wineries in a day (over the course of which I'd sent Jill numerous increasingly drunk, increasingly less coherent texts), caused everyone to be better about pacing themselves, and when they all got back, everyone was surprisingly not hammered. I was very proud.
Meanwhile, over the course of the day I had just lain in bed alternating between sleeping and pondering the mysteries of the universe. A couple times I got as far as the hot tub, which was heavenly. The first time I got in the hot tub, I realized after a few minutes that for the first time in several days, I didn't actively feel any pain. It's very hard to describe how nightmarish constant pain is; I don't know how people who suffer from chronic pain deal with it. Eventually the heat forced me out, but for a brief time, I felt human again.
Jill stayed with me all day and in the afternoon helped ready dinner for the crew. For her, it was another day of quietly taking care of me, and basically the entire group. At one point, while I was lying in bed thinking about one of the more vexing questions on my mind- who should be the officiant at our wedding- the clouds parted in the sky and like a vision straight from the heavens, the answer revealed itself...
me (weakly croaking): "jill..."
(no response... Jill is in the other room, preparing dinner for everyone)
me (slightly louder): "Jill..."
(still no response... I can ear all kinds of rustling in the kitchen)
me (mustering all my strength): "JILLLLLLLLL!"
(Jill comes running into the room, apparently concerned that I was about to die or something)
Jill: "ohmygodwhatisitareyouokay?????"
me: "I have it!"
Jill: "What?"
me: "I HAVE IT! I HAVE THE ANSWER!!"
Jill: "You have *what* answer?"
me: "JOHN ROBERTS!"
Jill: "Are you delirious right now?"
me: "No, wait- John Roberts should be our officiant! What do you think???"
Jill: "Ooooooh, that's *perfect*. That's a great idea!"
me: "Yup. I've made my contribution for the day. Uh, I'll just lie here now and bask in the warm glow of my brilliance."
Jill: "Yeeeahhh, you do that. I've got shit to do."
So, that evening Jill and I asked JRob to be our officiant, and we were delighted when he said yes. We celebrated with champagne, and I even got to have a glass myself. Delicious.
The next day, the last day of winetasting, I managed to get as far as the first winery, and even had a few tiny sips. Sadly, by the time we arrived at the second place, I was in so much pain I couldn't even make it inside, and Jill ended up having to take me back. Then once we got back to the house, we realized that we'd neglected to get the key from Ed, so we had to call Socci and use the magic of internet GPS locating software to meet at a random point halfway between the house and the winery (which were not at all close to each other) so we could pick up the key. Even in a severely weakened state, my ability to sow logistical mayhem was undaunted.
I spent the rest of the day in bed and in the hot tub again, until everyone returned and we could head back to SF for our traditional dinner at a steakhouse somewhere in the city. I loves me some steak, and I actually felt well enough to make it through the entire dinner without any significant discomfort. Then we dropped the NYC crew at the airport, and bid them goodbye.
It was sad to see them go; having the company around was actually instrumental in keeping my spirits up. Still, the greatest thanks goes to Jill. She took care of everyone all weekend, most obviously, but not exclusively, me, and did so without complaining, when frankly she had many reasons to do so. There are many ways to say "I love you"- some are grand gestures, like elaborate proposals with diamond rings. Others are more straightforward and obvious, like just saying the words. But I think that the most meaningful ways we say "I love you" to each other are in a thousand small actions throughout a day: helping the other get dressed because they can't do it themselves, making them meals again and again, taking care of their friends. It's easy to overlook or take for granted the little things that our loved ones do for us.
People often ask me: did the accident change you? Are you different because of it? The answer is: partly yes and partly no. To some extent I was insulated from the near-deathness of the whole experience, because I had no idea how close I'd come until nearly 24 hours later, when I already knew I would be fine (eventually). I am definitely a little more edgy when I'm driving in the rain. But really, the big change for me was seeing in a whole new way how amazing Jill is, and experiencing in a very real, concrete way how strong our bond had become in such a very short time. At one point she said to me "We can't live like we used to live anymore- we're not responsible just to ourselves, we're responsible to each other."
And the truth is, she's right about that. So perhaps the greatest change of all is that I feel keenly a sense of responsibility to her. Put another way, it's possible that the accident caused me to grow up a little bit. Me being who I am, I guess I had to nearly die in order for that to happen, but hey- we've all got our quirks. As L said, "Dude, you can't be Peter Pan anymore." I guess he's right.
And, that's ok.
