Milestones
Feb 8, 2007 Brainwaves
(NOTE: I’ve corrected some time information below that I’d misunderstood from previous reports.)
Life is measured in milestones.
When you think about the passage of time, there are a lot of reference points to work with. There are absolute reference points, like “it’s been five weeks since the beginning of the year,” or “it’s been six years since 2001.” Then there are relative reference points, such as “it’s been almost four years since I graduated,” or “it’s seven months until my apartment contract is up.”
The latest relative milestone for me is “it’s been five days since my sister’s car accident.”
———
Approximately (from what my folks have been able to determine) 11:30 PM Friday night 11:30 AM Saturday morning, my sister Megan was driving to her boyfriend’s house after leaving her apartment. She was on a straightaway, and the roads were clear… except for one snowdrift across her side of the road.
After you’ve been driving in snow for a while, you fight off the instinct to hit the brakes when you run into a snowdrift. Instead, you may just let off the gas a little, or just power through it, but if you brake, you slide.
She hit the brakes and slid, spinning into the opposite lane.
The driver in the other car (whom I don’t know anything about — I don’t know what my parents know, if anything) had no time to swerve or dodge, and hit Megan’s Bonneville broadside, passenger-side.
Mom has seen pictures of her car; I have not. The passenger seat ended up behind and wrapped around the driver’s seat, and they think she might have actually hit her head on the seat. She was unresponsive when emergency workers arrived at the scene. After cutting the top off the car to get to her, she was loaded onto a helicopter to be flown to Rochester, but due to some combination of the weather and problems on the aircraft, was loaded into an ambulance instead and taken to a hospital here.
By mid-Saturday afternoon she was out of the emergency room and into ICU, being treated for a bruised liver and a bruised and swelling brain, but did not suffer any broken bones. Despite that, though, there has been, so far, no evidence of brain damage. She hasn’t been fully conscious since it happened, to my knowledge, so I don’t know what that statement is based on, but then again, I’m not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV.
———
From what I’ve been told, she’ll ultimately be fine, but it’ll take a long time — more likely months than weeks. Fortunately, the combination of a deployed airbag and being hit passenger side is apparently causing us to be talking about lengthy recovery times instead of making funeral arrangements.
I’ll post more when I hear it. In the mean time, keep Megan in your thoughts and prayers.
I’m hoping my next milestone will be a little more pleasant.
