May 20th, 2016 - Nancy Stohlman
- 1 hour ago
- 8 min read
The Bargain
On May 20, 2016, I was hit by a drunk driver in broad daylight on a three-lane interstate during rush hour. I was on my way to an open mic reading, already running late. I was wearing my new jeans, a striped t-shirt and my favorite pink Victoria’s Secret bra. These would all be unceremoniously scissored off in the ambulance, sliced right down the middle. Only my shoes and belt would survive.
Are you sure you don’t want to come to the reading? I’d asked my 11-year-old. No, thanks. Later, he will remember he was watching the movie Concussion when his sister told him the news, that mom was in the hospital.
Since I was running late, I had to make a quick decision: drive through town or take the highway. I paused for a full 5 seconds at the stop sign: Town or highway? Left? Right?
I turned left and merged onto the highway.
I joined the impatience of rush hour mixed with the buzz of an almost summer evening. Still sunny at this hour, I noticed the slow-moving traffic going the opposite direction and gave thanks that I was on this side--where cars were moving along at a healthy clip. It took a few seconds to register the out-of-place detail: the one careening car that had somehow peeled itself away from the east-bound mob and was now bouncing swiftly across the grassy median, picking up speed, two unlit headlights like two eyes coming right at me before the world disappeared.
The lawyers would tell me later the driver, Jose Abril, his real name, was not only intoxicated but also driving on a suspended license when he decided to try and outsmart the east-bound traffic jam by speeding along the shoulder, where he lost control of the car and went sailing across the median head first in the swiftly moving westbound traffic. Apparently after the impact I spun out and hit two other cars, and westbound traffic would also come to a complete stop. I was mercifully unconscious for that part—I only remember the final “oh shit “ as inevitability came racing toward me over the green hills, and I remember returning to consciousness on the side of the highway, dust motes still spinning in the aftermath.
Many years later, highway C-470 would replace all their grassy median dividers with concrete walls.
I came-to in my car alone in the eerie silence of after. There was a kind of static inside my car, everything stirred up in the evening sunbeams. After realizing what had happened and that I was alive, my second instinct was to take stock—could I move my legs? My arms? Not the left one. Did I still have teeth? What were all these pieces covering me? My whole body was shaking violently from the adrenaline—I could barely control my hands as I tried to find my phone—miraculously unbroken in my purse on the floor—and call my partner at the time. He remembers he had just put all his clothes in the washing machine when he got the very garbled message: I’ve been hit by a car I don’t know what’s going to happen I’m on the highway come find me—and by the time he put on wet clothes and drove to the highway they’d roped everything off and cleaned up most of the debris. All the officer on the scene could tell him was: she’s alive.
Back in the car people were crowding the windows, concerned faces looking through spidered glass: we saw everything/that guy was crazy, and by the time the ambulance sirens got close enough to drown out all the talking someone pushed a stack of business cards through the hole of my former driver’s side window: we are all witnesses. Somehow I had the presence of mind to put them in my purse and then to take that purse with me when the First Responders finally pried the door off my car, doing their best to protect me from flying glass and debris as they lifted me into the ambulance, where my clothes were scissored off and the concerned faces looking down at me let me know how bad it really was: the whole left side of my torso had been crushed, breaking six ribs and puncturing my lung, which was currently collapsing and felt like a boulder on my chest.
Adrenaline is an amazing thing. It wasn’t until they cut an incision through my torso and shoved a breathing tube directly into my collapsed lung that I felt anything close to pain. By then I was on a steady morphine drip, and the EMTs who had rescued me were crowding around my bedside with those concerned faces I would come to recognize: Is her back broken. No. Is her pelvis broken? Amazingly, no. Not even her legs. You are so lucky, they would tell me over and over. You are so lucky you should buy a lottery ticket.
By the time they were pulling glass out of my skin with steel wool brushes and tweezers, my partner had arrived in wet clothes, escorted into the ER by a policeman. If the doctors and EMTs had kept their reactions under control, I saw the truth of the situation in his face as he clearly tried not to throw up, averting his eyes while holding my good hand. He would later tell me: I saw your bones. I saw your meat.
This could become just another near-death story, a story of how the body pushes glass out through the skin for year to come, or how I spent so long in the hospital I missed my oldest daughter’s high school graduation, still hooked up to the lung machine, crying in my hospital bed while a friend sent me live video updates, the only time I really cried over my situation.
But there’s another reason I’m telling you this story.
In the 10 years since, I’ve come to believe that a conversation occurred in those moments when the world went dark—those moments of collision and impact and spinning across three lanes of rush-hour traffic, a collision that even the tow truck driver who salvaged the remains of my car from the scene would later assume was fatal when I showed up to reclaim the car months later—you survived that? In a Chevy Cavalier?
Yes, I’ve come to believe that some sort of bargain took place above the scene of the crime, a conversation that might have gone like this:
Do you want to go back? You could just leave now. Or you could go back, but you will have to grow and learn some hard things.
I’ll go back.
And then bam—I awoke in the silence of the car having just stopped spinning.
Lucky, lucky, lucky.
It clicked for me in the ER, with all those kind faces looking down at me, and a police officer asking for a statement, and my friend turning green, and the doctor trying to joke about all the glass in my elbow, while and hooking me up to morphine: I was lucky.
And I had another choice: be a victim—or be alive. Gloriously, joyfully, gratefully alive.
This was what I came back to learn: I could wallow in the unfairness of it all, feel sorry for my poor, broken self, feel angry at Jose Abril and anyone else behind the wheel, angry at my bad luck, all the time, money and effort it would take to rehabilitate my body, the pain—oh yes, the pain of 6 shattered ribs and an arm that had to be reconstructed, the terror of driving again, the legal bs, the insurance bs (oh course Jose Abrile was driving illegally), how I couldn’t wash my own hair or wear a bra for nearly 6 months.
Or I could tell you about the gifts, all the magical things that started happening as soon as I made the choice to stay joyful, how people I had never met were sending flowers to my hospital room until it was filled with the sweet humidity of a botanical garden, the friend who hung a velvet painting of Ricky Martin in my hospital room (we nicknamed him the Patron Saint of Puerto Rican drivers). The surprise of visits from friends you didn’t expect, and even the disappointment of friends who didn’t come. I could tell you about not one but two angel visits—one in broad daylight with an actual harp—the other disguised as a nurse in the middle of the night with a very specific message: An accident is a reminder to be grateful for every little thing in your life. I could tell you about the Gofundme that my best friend started to raise money for the pay I wouldn’t receive for the summer classes I wouldn’t be able to teach, all the strangers who donated, the small but perfect settlement that covered my 200k hospital bills, dentist’s appointments, follow up surgeries and physical therapy on my now atrophied arm, even the way a full year later, pieces of glass would slowly push their way to the surface of my skin like my body was crying sparkly tears.
See, 10 years later, this has become a story of radical gratitude, how a simple decision to choose love in the face of fear, to choose gratitude in the face of disaster, changed everything.
The story could have gone another way. Not just the way of my demise, of course, but I could have allowed myself to become a victim–because I was a victim. I’d been driving sober, doing the speed limit, wearing my seat belt. I’d done everything right—so why did this bad thing happen to me?
Happiness is a choice. Joy is a choice. Despair is also a choice. We do not get to control what happens out there, even if we think we can. If we’re waiting for everything to line up just perfectly on the outside so we can finally be happy, then we are living a precarious existence, emotionally vulnerable to every storm cloud, every traffic jam. Every news headline. We each get our own unique flavor of catastrophe—our own specialized opportunity to grow. But I’ve come to believe this is the true work of being human: Instead of being wrecked by every setback, inconvenience, and honest-to-god tragedy, can you find your way back to love in the face of whatever awful thing is coming at you at 60 mph on a beautiful May evening?
I wish I could tell you I live my life from that place every day. I slip into all the regular fears and anxieties—I indulge my share of petty bull and insecurities. There is a common counter-thought that being positive, or seeing the blessing in our situations, is somehow avoiding reality. That choosing joy anyway is somehow betraying our pain. Life hurts, and, as the bumper sticker says, if you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention.
Perhaps it’s about what you pay attention to. Perhaps if you aren’t in awe and wonder at the exquisite mystery of this life: you aren’t paying attention, either? As creatives, we are told to be observant, notice every detail. Do we just do that on the page, or do we do it in life? Do we pay attention, radical attention, to the wonder of our lover’s face? The way the clouds move to announce the storm, the resilience of trees, the gift of friendship, the miracle of a sunrise, the tantric experience of an orange, warm from the sun? Or do we barrel ahead, staying in our lane, guarded against life, drunk on indifference, focused just on the next mile, not even noticing the careening car until it hits us from the side?
Do we have to wait until life T-bones us on a three-lane highway to pay attention to the absolute wonder of this life?
Maybe today I’ll finally buy that lottery ticket.
