Ghost In the Broken Shell
Classic TBI: The emergency room tells me I'm "just fine." (Spoiler: I'm not.)
December 21, 2000
12:16 a.m.
I-25 and Uintah, Colorado Springs, CO
28 years old
…my driver’s side wheels slam back onto the ground. My head slams into the doorframe. My car skids back across both lanes and comes to a final, jarring stop.
Silence.
Black sky.
Dashboard lights glowing.
Hands still death-gripping the steering wheel.
Am I breathing? I think so.
Can I move? Dunno.
Headlights flash from the frontage road, bounce into the ditch. A truck. Guy clambering up the ravine. Car door opening. A man’s voice. “Are you all right?”
“I dunno.” Ears ringing.
“Don’t move. I’m a fireman. I’ve called 911.”
Is that a flashlight? I wince away. Too bright. Stop it.
Questions about how I am and my name and what happened. Out there—“Hey, watch your step.” Young kid. I hear my car is gushing antifreeze all over the freeway. A blonde lady brings a blanket. Tucks it all around me except my left shoulder. Seatbelt in the way. Brrrr.
Dashboard lights. Orange. Dome light. White. I blink. Slow. “‘S the other person okay?” I ask.
The blonde sniffs. “Yeah, she’s up hoppin’ around, looking at her car.”
Shivering. Shivering. Teeth chattering.
“Are you cold?”
“Y-yeah.”
Hands pulling the blanket closer around me. They roll down the window and close the car door. Better. “Don’t move. We don’t know what kind of injuries you have.”
“’Kay.”
So cold. So quiet. Except the high-pitched ring. Never stops. Like you hear in movies after a bomb goes off and the characters are all out of it. Time and time and time on the dark road before red-and-blue lights blink somewhere out there. Bounce off the roof and windows of my car. Dance with the dashboard lights. Everything looks streaked but it’s not raining.
Finally, a police officer. “What happened?”
“Was d-driving home’n this car came up from behind. Too fast. C-couldn’ get outta the way’n they rammed me’n I hit the median.”
“Uh-huh.”
Disbelief.
Why disbelief?
“Have you had anything to drink tonight?”
“No.”
“How fast were you going?”
“Ffffifty-ish?”
“Uh-huh. It’s a fifty-five zone. So more like seventy-ish?”
“Nuh-uh. ’S a construction zone. Snowed yesterday. I’dun like black ice.”
“Where were you coming from?”
“Walmart. Went C-Christmas shopping ’cause…knew it’d be empty. Hate it there during the day. ’S a zoo. Got all my presents. Hope everybody likes ‘em. They’re in the back.”
Crunchy footsteps fade.
Time and time and time and I’m horizontal. Staring up at the sky. Stars again. Clouds over one patch. Velcro sound. Arms, head, legs—pinned to a board. Shivering. Young paramedics. Cute. Heh. All smiling down at me as they hoist me toward the ambulance. “You’re going to be okay.”
“We’ve got you now, miss. Just relax.”
“We’re taking you to the hospital. Which one do you want to go to? Penrose or Memorial?”
My tongue shivers off, “L-L-Live near Penrose.”
“All right. Just relax and try not to move.”
“’Kay…” I grin up at them. Show them a bunch of chattering teeth. “Wait’l you g-g-guys s-see what I’m—w-wearing under this coat.”
Heads snap down toward me. “Oh, really?”
“What’s that?”
My grin broadens. “B-belly dancer costume. Heh-heh…”
They all laugh and exchange looks.
Humor.
Humor good in emergencies.
Ambulance. White ceiling. White lights. I wince. Shouldn’t it be softer? Nice bulbs to keep people calm? But it’s bright. Stop it. I squint ‘cause I can’t look anywhere else. We start moving. Huh. We’ll be on the overpass now. Almost got hit there. Good thing I wasn’t speeding or I might be dead. Off the Uintah bridge. Wheeee…. Good thing I did something right. Didn’t flip the car. Might be…dead. Good…
Thing.
Black night.
White ceiling!
Hospital.
Voices. Overlapping. Evil lights. Shouldn’t it be calming?
Calm good in emergencies.
Nope. Squint again. Loud. Stop it. Faces above, like that gurney shot in the movies. White coats. More questions. Thick tongue. Wheelie-wheelie into another room. All alone. Again.
Time and time and time in that glaring room.
It comes. Finally. My lungs choke and my chest quivers and my throat burns and my whole body shakes. Hot tears slide down my face into my hair. I want my mommy and daddy. They’re sixteen hours away. I sob low and hard.
I sob a long time.
Finally, white coats come in. Pokey, proddy. Lots of questions. Thick tongue. Cobweb words.
Forehead wrinkles. “‘S it weird that I didn’ fffeel anythin’ before but…now. Neck ‘n’ shoulders’r startin’a tighten up?”
“No, that’s pretty common.”
“’Kay.”
Pokey. Proddy—
“Agh!” Stab in my left hip. Sore left arm. Forearm.
One abrasion on my whole body.
“We’re going to take x-rays to make sure your vertebrae aren’t fractured or broken.”
“’Kay.”
Dark room. Dark and greenish. Nicer than mean white lights. Young guy. Ties to get my necklace off. Can’t figure out the clasp. I can’t help ‘cause I’m strapped to the board. He shrugs. Smiles. “Well, I guess you don’t really need neck x-rays.”
“’Kay.”
He’s the doc. Knows what he’s…
Doing.
Black room.
White room. White counter.
How’d I get here?
Heck, how’d I get on my feet!
They give me the thumbs-up. No broken anything. No lacerations. No punctures. No nothin’. They say I’m perfectly fine. Whew.
Now I have paperwork.
I blink a few times.
Lines won’t stay put. Bunch of black, blocky things on a big white thingy.
Letters.
I know what they are. I know how to read, damn it. Had my own reading group in second grade ‘cause I was reading at a sixth grade level. Just me and John. I was friggin’ valedictorian. I can read a stupid paper! What the fuck!
Might as well be Chinese. Don’t wanna tell that to the nurses. They’re snooty. Un-nice. Out there laughing, chatting except when they talk to me. Then “nicey-nice” down their noses. Oh, what? Is it the belly dancer costume?
Typical.
Bite me.
“Aren’t you finished yet?”
I glare. “Tryin’. I’m tired.”
I grit my teeth, squint, burn holes into the paper with my glare, scribble out some stuff.
Waiting.
Waiting.
Wait—
“Agh!” Something stabs my back. Knife in the base of my spine. I stagger forward, clutch the gurney. Another stab. I hobble out to the nurse’s station to tell them. They send me back into the room. “I’m sure it’s just a muscle spasm. If you have any pain in the next few days, give us a call and we can prescribe something.”
“’Kay.”
More knives as I try to snooze on the gurney before the policeman comes in. Same guy. Burly. Walrus mustache. Official with his clipboard. “Well, she was drunk. Three times over the legal limit.”
My eyes bulge, then narrow to dagger-slits as I spill myself off the gurney. That sure explains some things. I growl. “Yeah. No shit.”
He smirks. “She tried to tell me that you were in front of her and spontaneously crashed into the median, then hit her car.”
My eyes are death-rays. I snarl.
“Exactly.” He scoffs. “I went back to look at your bumper and saw the chunk taken out of it.”
I snarl again. Am I frothing at the mouth?
More questions. More paperwork. More crossed eyes.
He gives me his card. I’m cleared to go, but I have no way to get home. They let me call people on their big wall phone with all the lit-up buttons.1 No one answers. They get me a cab. I shuffle-limp out the front doors.
The driver opens the car door for me. Older guy, gray hair. “What happened?”
I lurch my way in and wrangle the seatbelt around me. “Drunk driver. Rammed me on the freeway.”
His eyes fly open. “By Uintah?”
“Yeah.”
“That was you?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re walking?”
I shrug. “Mm-hmm. They say I’m fine.”
Turns out, I was not fine. In truth, Penrose Hospital is lucky that I woke up after going to sleep for the night, completely alone, on a closed-head injury.2
They’re also lucky none of my cervical vertebrae were fractured, although the next morning I had a golf-ball sized lump in the back of my neck. Two decades later, I still have that lump because my vertebrae are still misaligned. It’s smaller because the swelling went down decades ago, but it’s always there. Same with that knife in the base of my spine. It grinds now, because my back has become warped like a long S-curve and my hips are lopsided.
That’s super awesome for a professional dancer and long-time martial artist.
UPDATE 10/1/23: In 2016, I switched from traditional rack-n-crack chiropractic to Upper Cervical and then to Neuro-Chiropractic (on my own dime, thank you very much because Medicaid girls don’t get to have treatment that actually heals these types of injuries). Since then, we’ve begun to slowly—slooooooooowly undo this damage. It’s also what prompted the cessation of most of my seizures.
Unfortunately, in November 2022 my bum knee, my bum foot, and my still-warped peripheral vision/depth perception misfired. I fell down my stairs, slammed my butt on the edge of a step an inch from my tailbone, and undid the majority of the progress we’d made in my hips and low back in .37 seconds. It also gave me my fourth concussion.
We’ll get way more into bodily injury in the future.
Since this story was originally written in 2019 during the holidays after I heard about yet another drunk driver bragging on Fakebook about how she had outwitted a DUI checkpoint, then went on to inform everybody where it was so they could avoid it, too…yeahhhhh…I frothed at the mouth and regurgitated this series onto my old blog. Hence why it sometimes requires updates.
I hear I only weathered that wreck so well because of the athletic shape I was in when it happened.
Dancer-hiker-fighter-chick, ya know.
I only have hazy snapshots of recollection from that first week, sparser and sparser as the days passed and my brain swelled more, pressing against the inside of my nasty, bony skull, which created even more bruising and micro-tears.3 All these injuries stole chunks of my memory and made it difficult to convert the day’s happenings into long-term memories. Or sometimes, to remember what I’d done five minutes ago.4
I wouldn’t realize that for three years.
There was a lot of stuff I wouldn’t realize for years.
Good thing I’d been an avid journaller before the wreck, and remain so to this day. It’s basically my external hard drive and constantly saves my butt.
No Home For the Holidays
No surprise, I didn’t get to fly home for the holidays that year. Spent a few hours of Christmas Day at a friend’s house. Slept the rest of the time.
I hear I called my parents that evening.
At 3:00 a.m. my father awoke to my mother flinging things into a suitcase. When he asked what-in-the-bleep she was doing, she told him, “I’m driving out there. Right now. I don’t know who we talked to on the phone tonight, but that was NOT my daughter.”
She was correct. Moms know these things. Often before we do. Good thing they started driving from Minnesota to Colorado within the hour, because it turns out I wasn’t fine. That drunk on the road had actually killed me.
I just didn’t die.5
Up Next: HOLIDAY HELL DAYS 1-3 - The day after a drunk driver rams me, the world around me shuts down for two weeks.
© 2020 Hartebeast
THIS WHOLE ADVENTURE STARTS HERE:
BLAM.
A SNARKY POEM ABOUT TBI
This happened six or seven years before I got my first cell phone, don’tcha know.
Back when this happened, it was commonly believed that you had to keep someone with a closed head injury awake until they were back to seeming “okay,” because otherwise they might slip into a coma and die. We didn’t have the same sorts of assessment tools as we do now, and we certainly didn’t have proper emergency room protocols to diagnose so called “mild” Traumatic Brain Injury right away. (In many ways, we still don’t.) In too many cases, if your skull hadn’t been cracked open or you weren’t bleeding out your eyes and ears…eh. You were just sent home.
If you were lucky, they told your family and friends to wake you up every few hours to make sure you were sleeping, not unconscious.
If you were like me, they didn’t.
If you were like me, the police were also told that “there were no injuries” in that incident so the whole thing got filed under T for Traffic “Accident.”
What happens to your body and brain during whiplash from a simple rear-ending. Super clear video. This was my first impact while my head was turned/tilted from looking at the rear-view mirror. There were two more after that, including my skull slamming the door frame, in addition to the circular sloshing from the car almost flipping. Basically, I have shaken-baby syndrome.
Concussion & TBI - another video. I had every one of these symptoms except vomiting. Then again, it’s always been really hard to get me to puke. Go me.
Traumatic Brain Injury - Mayo Clinic
Secondary Brain Injury - the further damage that can happen in the hours and days after the primary injury
Memory and TBI - oh, heck yes! Both visual and audio formats! In TBI-Land it’s important to have both. (I am trying to get video versions of these tales for y’all who need to hear and/or read lips, but I’m having a lot of neuro issues right now so reading/speaking is difficult. Showering is sparse. Makeup ain’t happenin’. I’ll load them when I can.)
Post-Traumatic Amnesia - I have a smidge of retrograde amnesia, but mine is mostly a haze of patchy anterograde (although I can remember the night of the crash itself so I’m not full-on 50 First Dates Girl). That topic will get an entire series of its own.
Think I’m being melodramatic? I’m being quite literal. When A Loved One’s Personality Changes After Brain Injury
After reading your last post ‘Blam’ it was good to read this follow up of what happened next.
It’s a harrowing tale, but on the positive side you tell it very well. Your descriptions are wonderful.
I particularly liked this one:
“My eyes bulge, then narrow to dagger-slits...” - that is such a perfect description of what happens!
Thanks