Emma Carmichael and her cousin Molly were hit by a truck this summer. Their bodies and minds are slowly healing.
I talked about it in the weeks following, as friends came to visit. "Want to hear what I remember?" I'd ask. I was prepared, even if my audience was not. For a while, I found comfort in re-telling it, and even in seeing their horror. I couldn't remember much, but I could tell you about where we'd been standing, and just how it looked when my vision mercifully faded black as I went into shock. Telling it, more than the rods protruding from my body — four down my left leg, one in each hip — was proof that it had happened. It all felt like a dream, so the story mattered.
While not nearly as traumatic as what happened to Carmichael and her cousin, I have been involved in a pair of, uh, happenings over the past two years, a car accident and a very slow-moving non-accident that has completely reshaped my life.1 But I identify completely with her about the weird thing that happens when you tell people news like that. "I was hit by a truck and almost died." "I was on my bike and got hit by a car and now I have 9 stitches on my thumb." "You haven't heard, but _________ and _______ are ________." It stops the conversation dead and you can see the other person completely reform themselves around your news. One sentence changes them and it happens right in front of you. It's a powerful ability, to make someone feel so bad so quickly.
But we were so lucky, I've said again and again. I know it's true, and also that it's a hollow line for a moment of chance I'm unable to make sense of.
My bike accident was not my fault. The driver ran a red light and hit me.1 The thumb on my dominant hand got sliced up, it was difficult to work for a couple weeks, I have thousands of dollars in medical bills, my hand still hurts more than a month and a half later, and the doctor who took my stitches out casually mentioned that it would take "6 to 9 months" before I would know if I'd get full, normal feeling back in my thumb (which means that I might not have a normal-feeling thumb again). I should be super pissed at the driver (it was a fucking Uber, of course) and really frustrated about the whole thing. But I just can't work up any negative emotion about it at all. The only thing I feel is really really lucky. It could have been so much worse...six inches to the left and maybe I'd be unable to type this.
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Yeah, sorry, I'm not going to tell you what this is. It's not that tough to guess if you've been paying attention.↩
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I still blame myself for it. A little. If I hadn't been in such a hurry and distracted from researching health insurance options for my kids (health insurance "options" for the self-employed in NYC are maddening!), I would have been paying more attention, and it wouldn't have happened. That's the deal with biking in NYC: the second you stop paying proper attention to everything around you, you're at risk.↩