A Series of Unfortunate Incidents (#8)

across the intersection / lickety split / wonderful truck / wasn't it (adapted from an old Burma Shave series of signs)

Nine years ago.  Driving down Blanco Road, only a few blocks from my home.  Intersection with Bitters Road.  I’m driving right at the speed limit in my emerald-green Ford Range as I approach the intersection.  My light is green.  His is red on the turn left sign.  He ignores it.  We have an almost head-on collision.  Everything quickly turns to black.

When I wake up I am draped in the cloth they use for air bags and do not know where I am.  I slowly come back to consciousness and manage to get my door open.  I am covered in glass and blood.  My face, especially, has streaks of blood running down to my chin.  I stumble out of the truck, see that the police and EMS have arrived.  Flashing red and blue lights almost put me out again.  I stagger to the side of the road and lie down.

I am fortunate that three separate witnesses in different cars have all stopped to tell the police what happened.  The guy who ran the red light is lying about what happened.  I am shaking and am not a good witness.  I keep seeing his headlights, almost elevated, flying, racing into my eyes.  The EMS techs finally reach me, clean my wounds a bit, tell me I am in shock but should be okay.  That isn’t really true.  A wrecker has hooked my demolished Ranger up and asks me where I want it taken.  I mumble something.  He asks if I’m okay.  I tell him I just need to sleep.  He takes me home before hauling my pickup to the body shop.

Susan sees me and screams.  Two minutes later, we are in her car headed to the ER at Southwest Methodist Hospital in the Medical Center.  That’s the closest trauma center.  They clean me up, new bandages, and send me home.  I take the next day off work to just stay home and hurt…uh, stay home and heal.  I find out that day that my truck, as I had thought, had been totaled.

I Visit Round Top, Texas ( a great drive down back roads)

A week later (and I am aware that this is stupid), I get in my rental car, and drive a hundred or so miles to Festival Hill, not far from LaGrange (home of the famous Chicken Ranch of Best Little Whore House in Texas fame), in Round Top, where a poetry festival has sprung up in the middle of miles of garage sales.  I have a small cabin overlooking fields and a few woods.  At night, they are filled with fireflies (we used to call them lightning bugs).  Absolutely stunning.  You can read more about Festival Hill and see some of it at http://festivalhill.org/

A poet I admire tremendously, Adam Zagajewski, is the featured reader the next morning.  You can read his poem “Balance” at http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20101  He’s a fine reader and leads a discussion of “poetry of witness.”  We have a slight disagreement when he suggests that Americans can’t really write such poetry since we have no real experience, on our home ground, of the terrible effect of war.  I disagree and point to Walt Whitman’s poetry and Herman Melville’s Battle Pieces.  Katherine Kaspar adds Emily Dickinson. She’s absolutely correct.

We leave to go to lunch and, walking down the stairs to the dining area, I pass out.  A curtain falls and I am back in the darkness.

I open my eyes in an ambulance headed to LaGrange and am kept in the ER there for six hours until I can demonstrate some form of comprehensibility.  The folks at Festival Hill (and this is a wonderful place endowed by the great pianist James Dick back in 1971) sends a car to pick me up. By the way, Festival Hill is only a mile from the place where UT has its summer Shakespeare Festival.  You can go to this little out-of-the-way place and enjoy a spectacular concert on Festival Hill and the next day attend a fine play by Wil’m Shaxsper.  I feel much better and manage to drive back home.

Aftermath

The next morning I call Dr. Atlas and he refers me immediately to a neurologist. I have an EEG.  Results:  subdural hematoma caused by the car wreck a few days earlier.  He tells me that people do, frequently, pass out a few days after such an accident, but that he doesn’t think the blood that has leaked into my brain pan is really bad enough to have caused me to pass out.  Just ignore it, he says, and it should clear itself up soon.

My PCP is unwilling to just ignore it.  He wants to find out why I had passed out at Festival Hill.  As a result of his curiosity and concern, he sends me to a cardiologist.

Next:  adventures in Cardiology