Holiday Hell: Days 1-3

The day after I get rammed by a drunk driver, the world around me shuts down for 2 weeks.

Fade To Black-n-White

The day after a drunk driver rammed me in the middle of the night on Winter Solstice, I learned that the emergency room had been wrong. I was not “just fine.” My insurance company was open long enough for me to inform them of the incident.

Then they closed for the holidays.

Pretty much the theme of that whole season.

🎄 Fa-la-la-la-laaaa
La-la-la-FUCK. 🎄

Oh, you actually want the deets? Ohhh, goodness. Okay.

I’ll warn you now, this post is an exercise in ridiculata. Ridiculous, I tell you! We serious writers do NOT post entries ripped from the raw, steaming guts of our journals, yo. Especially not the crap-crap-crappiest feelings of TBI, compounded by bodily injury and PTSD when one’s family lives 22 hours away.

But if you don’t know, then you can’t know.

So here we go.

(I promise, there’s purring and warm, sweet beverages by the end.)

Since I’d been a devoted Morning Pages Girl¹ for some time, the habit of recording the details of my daily doings (dirty deeds? dookie droppings?) was well ingrained. Good thing.

Once I stopped being able to properly store memories the natural way, my journal became my external hard drive and the primary means by which I have any clue who I’ve been, and who I’ve been hanging around with, since December 21, 2000.

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🎄 Journal - Holiday Hell - Day 1 🎄
12/21/00
8:31 a.m.
28 years old

OK…body check:

Since I stretched out to snooze on the gurney—about 2:30 in the morning—my back has spazummed spazzemed spazzumed 7 times between the lumbars. Feels like someone jammed a knife between the vertabrae vertebray vertabrea.

Sidenote: it took me a long time to finally give up on remembering how to spell those two words—this from the former spelling bee champ. I knew they were wrong. I just couldn’t figure it out.

From the moment of the accident,² my low back has been tight and sore. Now it is just a constant, uncomfortable ache until the next knife-stab. My right shoulder on up the neck to where it meets my skull started to get sore as I was laying in the hospital.

I told them that, but they didn’t really look at it. Still sore now. I was definitely looking at the mirror and the right shoulder of the road when my head got snapped. That whole trap muscle feels stretched and not in a good way. My left wrist is still cracking when I move my hand around. There is a little abrasion on the outer forearm. Must have hit it. My left hip/thigh are still tender. Oooh, the right arm above the bicep and below the shoulder also tender. Hurts to move shoulder in circle. I have little abrasive bumps above my left temple. Probably from smacking my head against the door frame. They missed that one last night. It’s right up there at my hairline.

The things that were supposed to be on the docket:

🎄 TODAY 🎄

• Work. Was going to go in an hour early since I can’t stay late to make up for sick time hours. 9—3

• Teach private dance lesson 4—6

• Dance @ restaurant

🎄 TOMORROW 🎄

• Work from 9—5

• Dance @ restaurant again

🎄 SATURDAY 🎄

• Dance @ restaurant

🎄 SUNDAY 🎄

• Fly to MN for Christmas

🎄 NEW YEAR’S EVE 🎄

• Dance double show @ restaurant

Won’t be able to do any of that now.

My poor cats have no food—it’s in the back seat along with my Christmas presents. I wonder what my poor car looks like.

I’m so angry at her. I love my life. I need my body fully-functioning to eat and pay bills, much less for the simple joys of living, and she threatened all of that like she played Russian roulette with my car. Mine and everyone else’s she passed. I’m so livid!!!!!! And profoundly sad…

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Thankfully, a pair of friends had gotten me a birthday present a few days earlier. They’d given me a novelty I had never experienced before, and something they swore that every professional dancer should have: a chiropractic initial exam. Extra-thankfully, this chiropractor was willing to come in for some emergency visits with me, including on Christmas Eve and Day.

Best and most generous gift ever!

As it turned out, I had no idea how badly I needed this synchronistic gift because when I woke up the first morning (good thing I woke up the first morning), I was still working under the assumption that I was a little sore, a little tired, but I was “just fine.”

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🎄 Journal - Holiday Hell - Day 2 🎄
12/22/00
7:31 a.m.

I have another chiropractor appointment this morning. Not like he can actually put anything back where it belongs yet. It’s pretty much a low-key torture session of trying to get everything to relax. Hahahahahahah…good one.

This whole thing SUCKS! After I called in yesterday to say I would be missing work, my boss's wife sent her sister to me to take a look—Carol is a chiropractor visiting from AZ so she can't actually treat me. But she asked me detailed questions, then showed me how to do an ice massage. That sucked too.

She hit the muscles between my shoulder blade & spine and I about came unglued! I mean, they have been tight before—I use them every day in ways most people never knew they could be used, but now, they are just a plague of pain and give “electric” shocks of spasm when touched. Real good for my neck when I jump like that…

Sidenote: I could remember how to spell "spasm" but not “”spasmed” or “spasming." I could remember "vertebra" but not "vertebrae”. I dunno. Dain Bramage. It's inconsistent.

So she got to the neck, pulled up my hair, and said, “Oh, my God! Don’t move!” She found a golf-ball size lump on the right side. She poked around a little. The corresponding vertabrai vertabrae were not happy. So she immediately put me in a make-shift neck brace of towel, jacket & scarf. Thank goodness Rinna and her husband got me that chiropractor visit for my b-day. Carol was VERY concerned that I might have a fracture. She still is—“occult fracture,” she called it.³

BTW—writing this SUCKS! My neck, shoulder & arm are complaining already.

So we get meticulous x-rays taken—everyone is shocked & appalled that no one took x-rays of my neck at the hospital. Nope. Just from shoulder to lumbar. I remember the x-ray dude having problems getting my necklace off, but then he dropped it and said, “You won’t need x-rays of your neck anyway.” Even after I had said something about my neck & shoulder tightening earlier. Ugh.

So we go to the chiro office with the x-rays. I fill out the paperwork—which SUCKED—and they call my insurance company to make sure I won’t have to pay for it personally. Now, not only am I strung out from riding in a car—I’m jumping & flinching every time a car even moves in our general direction—screaming and crying like a lunatic at all those jerks who don’t stop at signs or lights until the last minute—that sucks too BTW. I didn’t need post traumatic syndrome!!!

And another thing! One of the few things I can actually do—sort of—is eat and today I woke up with cancher canchar cankor sores on my mouth and tongue which makes eating a painful and horrendous task as well. Besides the fact that since my neck is immobilized, I’m dropping food all over myself and everywhere. I need a flipping bib and highchair! AAAAGH!

It’s okay if you’re wince-laughing. As I go back through these journals and remember—or learn as if for the first time—the details of these incidents that are one big, misty smear of twinkle-light-laden suckitude to my memory, *I* am wince-laughing.

So. The insurance company totally sucked at explaining the confines of their PPO policy to me when I got it, and I end up frothing at the mouth cuz I’m gonna have to pay for those x-rays myself since the hospital didn’t bother to take neck x-rays in the emergency room and I didn’t dare wait to let Safeco process their stupid paperwork and find me a doctor themselves—which they said they can’t do until Tuesday after Christmas.

Not knowing if I had a neck fracture cuz the hospital didn’t do their jobs? Yeah right! No way I was waiting.

Wanna know a big secret? That date was LIES, ALL LIES, I tell you! Which was worse than if I'd just been told the real date from the outset, because those lies kept shattering my hopes each day I thought help would finally arrive.

I wasn't able to get ahold of my insurance adjustor on December 26th. Or my Primary Care Physician. Or anybody else for that matter.

I’m now starting to get irate with this insurance adjustor. I ask her to fax me a list of doctors. She tells me—the person with a possible neck fracture, who can’t look down to see my feet—that she will read a few over the phone and I can “just write them down.”

JUST WRITE THEM DOWN!!!!!!!!!

I was also concussed and didn't know it because the hospital didn’t have the proper procedure to test for that if someone’s skull wasn’t cracked open. So filling out paperwork was not only a literal pain in the neck. It was a neurological nightmare. So was interpreting audio input, especially when I couldn’t read someone’s lips, like on the phone. I also had major problems transferring what was said correctly into writing. (23 years later, I still have all these issues. Not as bad as when the TBI first occurred, but they’re still a problem.)

It would take this incident with my insurance adjustor for someone to finally mention the word "concussion" for the first time.

Hmmmm…three high-speed impacts, a near-roll over, bashing my head against the frame of the car…

Do ya think??

I hand the phone to my chiropractor before I start saying things I will regret.

The adjustor speaks with him, he takes the notes, they work it out, I grudgingly finish my paperwork. He takes me back and goes over in detail my x-rays.

As we can see, I was even putting written sentences in weird order. It was way worse while trying to speak.

No fracture—WHEW! But turns out my neck is curved forward—opposite from the curve it should be. The vertabrae vertabrai are twisted horizontally. My spine is doing an S all the way down my back, my lumbars are also twisted. Gee…no wonder I’m having spasms. No wonder there’s a golf-ball in my neck and a mountain ridge down the right side of my back.

So the chiro does a bunch of tests, puts me on electric current to relax the muscles—this is relaxed????—does more tests and fits me for a collar. He did a little pricky/proddy test on my arms—my right arm is slightly numb. Joy to the world. Such a subtle symptom but now that I am aware of it in among the nasties, it is annoying.

I also still have problems with that, on and off, to this day.

I got to sit with ice packs on various parts of my back & neck on & off all evening, then to go sleep with my neck stretched. This morning, I feel like I got ran over by a truck. Sore, achy, headache from hell. My entire neck is throbbing right up into my skull. I fear my teeth will be worn down from all the clenching & grinding. My jaws hurt.

This clenching and grinding will wreak havoc on my life 20 years later when my TBI, PTSD, reverse cervical curve, twisted vertebrae, and diagnosed-but-untreated TMJ produce such an overgrowth of jaw bone that my tooth implant can’t heal. Three surgeries and four years later...it’s getting there.⁴

Not only did I have to miss work & get somebody to dance for me at the last minute, but now I definitely can’t dance tonight or tomorrow. Was wigged about that all day until Dakini & Rinna said they’d cover for me. Also had to cancel poor William’s lesson—who had stayed overnight in a motel after the student show because he lives 45 minutes away!!!!!

Not cool.

This weekend & Thurs were supposed to help cover my groceries and the trip home to MN—but hey! I don’t think I’m even going to be able to do that now. And I can’t dance on New Years either, which would have been a good $500, so now I can’t even pay my rent & bills.

I am not allowing myself to look at money numbers right now! Like I need the stress.

And another thing! Trying to put my hair in a ponytail and wash my face SUCKS! Lifting my arms straight up or out is excruciating to my neck, back & shoulders.

All right, let’s look at some bright sides here: I am still alive!!!! I am not horribly maimed. I will dance again somday. I have all my limbs. I have the use of all my limbs. I did not roll the car. No one else hit my car when I went back across the lanes. Most of the medical & trauma & police staff were nice to me. I have the most awesome friends & family in the world.

I AM ALIVE!!!!

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Journal - Later:

OK, I’m back to bitching. I HATE feeling stupid! I hate having to think long & hard just to find the word I’m looking for. It’s like trying to start a car with a dead battery.

I love my friends for taking off work & rearranging their schedules to haul me around. I HATE having no right to be pissy when they’re late to pick me up, so then I’m late to an appointment. But they’re doing me a huge favor so I can’t say anything about it. I HATE feeling trapped because I have no mode of transportation. I am fifteen all over again!

But yet, I am terrified to drive. I told myself after the accident that there would be no rational reason to fear driving. I’ve gone for over 10 years without an accident.

This was actually not true, but I didn’t remember that. A gal had pulled out of an intersection a few months before my big wreck. Luckily, I swerved and she only clipped my bumper that time.

She wasn’t drunk.

She was high.

In my journals and emails I called my dead Mazda the Derelict Magnet for a long time.

I am so paranoid of the road now. I HATE living my life in fear!

And why am I going through all this? Because some conscienceless Bleeper decided that she needed to get plowed at her work’s holiday party and instead of taking a cab, instead of calling someone, she gets behind the wheel. So she didn’t catapult my spirit out of its hunk of flesh and bone. She took away my life! The life I’ve been building for 28 years. The life I’ve chosen. The person I am and the person I wanted to be!

Why?? Because of alcohol.

Alcohol and a car.

Neglect, carelessness, recklessness, total ill regard for the welfare of herself and everyone around her. Well, at least my vocabulary is returning from the land of “Uh-huh. No. I’m hungry. Ouch.”

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Journal - Later Still:

Wow…I just took my first shit since the accident! Tiny, rabbit pellet, putrid smelling craps that I had to force out. Thanks. I’m so bound up right now that it’s not even funny. I can feel the gas rumbling around in my guts. Yum. My chiropractor says this is really common. I’m so dehydrated that my lips are cracking, yet I’m drinking so much water that I’m in the bathroom every 15 minutes!

Which BTW also SUCKS! Pulling my pants down and up? Having to twist to wipe? Having to sit down and stand back up from the stupid toilet?

This whole thing SUCKS!!!!

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🎄 December 23 - Holiday Hell - Day 3 🎄

Ugh. In my journal: Rinse-Repeat-Rinse-Repeat of all the previous days’ worsening symptoms, pockmarked by examples of amazing people doing amazing things to save my battered butt.

Alas, I couldn’t get my demolished car out of the vehicle boneyard because I had no one to bring me there before the lot closed at noon on the 23rd. So it kept wracking up day after day of dollars, and I kept getting day after day of nasty-gram phone calls, telling me that I needed to get that hunk of junk off their dirt.

That’s why I couldn't get the cat food and Christmas presents I'd bought. A friend finally brought me some cat food, hallelujah, so I could stop feeding my poor felines people-food that wasn’t good for them.

My favorite incident of Christmas Eve-Eve was the guy who needed to get into his parking spot at Black Eyed Pea like he was a Nascar driver. Saphira had generously decided to get me out of the house and let me forget about Holiday Hell for a few hours. She took it extra slow over the speed bumps to not jostle my spine any more than necessary. She’s sweet like that, but then from behind us:

HONNNNNNK!!!!!!

Me: SPROING!!!!

I would have been on the ceiling, shivering with my claws dug in if I hadn't crumpled in agony a second later from jumping so hard.

And this was necessary…

WHY?

Apparently it was also necessary to keep honking when we didn’t obey their almighty dictate to move faster.

Let it be knowne: on the road, you have no idea why someone is taking their time over speed bumps. Why is your sacrosanct schedule or bad mood so much more important than my injuries?

"Well, how was I supposed to know?"

YEAH. Exactly. You don't flippin’ know, so do you really need to provide the Hap-Hap-Happiest Season with yet another Holiday Jerkface demanding that the entire world fall over themselves to adhere to your timeline?

It’s not like the dude rushed in with a pregnant wife because the only place to have a baby was Black Eyed Pea. Wasn’t carrying somebody inside because they were about to freeze to death or bleed out in his car either.

Nope, he bustled in with his nose in the air to have dinner with his equally snooty woman.

What we did not yet know was that I had lost access to that particular part of the brain that assesses risks, actions, consequences, appropriate conduct, etc., then administers the appropriate impulse control, especially where things that come out of my big gob are concerned.

I lurched out of that car before it was barely stopped. I didn't give two reeky rabbit pellets if he decided to get out and retaliate. I pointed at my neck brace and bellowed, "I HAVE A FUCKING NECK INJURY! HOLD YOUR HORSES!"

When we all wound up in the lobby together, the honk-happy dude and his date did not offer so much as a sheepish look, much less an apology. In fact, they looked at us like we were the ones who were out of line. Needless to say, I requested—in a terse, obnoxious voice (very unlike me, the former overly accommodating Nice Girl)—to be seated in a booth as far away FROM THEM as possible.

🔥👹🔥

Woo-sahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

Two Little Sunflares.

THE SILVER LININGS

And yet, through it all, the sun kept peeking through the clouds, revealing silver linings and the occasional rainbow.⁵ Like the lovely dinner Saphira and I had once we got to sit down in the blessed solitude of the back corner booth.

Or the huge, misty-eyed grins of the police officers dining across the restaurant. As Saphira generously paid for my supper, I bee-lined for their table in my raggedy ponytail, my newly exploded zit-volcanoes, my swanky red coat with the faux-leopard trim, my sweats, ratty boots, and neck brace. The officers’ eyes went huge with alarm.

I had no doubt they expected to get chewed out for the gazillionth time.

Instead, I thanked them for what they do. “One of your kind was so awesome with me the other night when I got rammed by a drunk driver on the freeway. And the whole paramedic team was, too. So I just wanted to thank all of you and to wish you Happy Holidays, however you celebrate them.”

Definitely one of the good things about having zero impulse control and zero filter on my gob. They all got a bit choked up and shook my hand, wishing me a speedy recovery and a good Christmas. I hope their season was made a little more merry & bright that night.

Another sunbeam shines through in the letter I wrote later that night to the man I was dating. We’d only known each other for six weeks before my car wreck, had kissed once after he took me out for my birthday a few days before, yet this man would wind up staying by my side through the worst years of my recovery.

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Dear Galen—

How your letters have brightened my day! Everyone has been so awesome to me. Bringing me things, carting me around, helping me out, just generally being concerned and affectionate. Even the owners of the Moroccan restaurant were so concerned!

I mean, I knew people cared for me...I guess I just hadn't realized how much. It is breathtaking, amazing, humbling, and so heart warming.

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© 2020 Hartebeast

UP NEXT: a filky musical interlude sung to the tune of Silent Night. Because we gotta get in some laughs around here. Dark chocolate laughs, but laughs nevertheless. Wut? Underworld humor, man.

1. Morning Pages from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way

2. I had not yet learned that DUI is no “accident.” In MADD-Land we call these things “crashes” or “wrecks” because drinking and driving is a choice. This is why, when you seriously injure someone while driving under the influence, it’s not a mere “traffic accident.” It’s considered the felony of Vehicular Assault. If you kill them it’s Vehicular Homicide. Maybe Vehicular Manslaughter so…yeah. Please don’t. And please understand that such incidents are never “accidents.”

3. Occult Fracture - a hidden fracture that often doesn’t show up on X-ray.

4. Yes. Tooth infections can still kill you. It’s rare now. But it can, if it goes for too long untreated.

For four years, my entire medical team of doctors, dentists, and oral surgeon played the shell game with me, trying to say that my myriad full-body symptoms that flared up every single time in the same exact order and the same exact spots whenever my dental infection flared was “everybody else’s jurisdiction but their own.”

My refusal to lie down and die infected, or to swallow their chronic antibiotics WITHOUT A SINGLE TEST OF MY PUS, BOILS, SORES, OR BLOOD, resulted in my diagnosis of Hysterical Female Syndrome. (Really, I have Medicaid Patient Syndrome. Squeaky-wheeling about that while possessing boobs and a vagina leads to HFS.)

Hysterical Female Syndrome.

Check it - go to your favorite search engine and type this in. It’s shocking just how often this topic gets written about:

• medicaid patients receive unequal treatment
  

• negative attitudes towards medicaid patients
  

• discrimination against medicaid patients

So yeah. Tooth grinding on untreated TMJ. 23 years later and it is one of the greatest banes of my existence. Not to mention what it’s doing to my teeth. Indeedy, it is wearing them down like I had feared on Day 2 of Holiday Hell.

(And yes. I meditate and woo-sah and get therapy and dance and stretch in the sunrise and give praise for nature’s wonders and do vision boards and write gratitudes and affirmations and intentions and…and…and…)

5. ✨🎄✨

Thanks to my new oral surgeon who finally figured out what was wrong with one simple test. And…you know…listening to his patient.

Thanks to my amazing neuro-chiropractor and sports-med chiropractor who keep patching Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

Thanks to my new optometrist who actually took my symptoms seriously and just sent me to have an emergency CT scan the other day - the first one anyone has ever recommended for me in spite of 6 brain traumas over 23 years.

The greatest thanks to my friends and the Parentals for having my back through all of this.