Worst Saturday Night Date Ever...

 The little red car after the accident we had on Saturday. 


 We were able to work in the garden a good part of the morning and afternoon on Saturday.  Got the green beans in, the tomatoes, the jalapenos, planted the spearmint. Got all the beds ready for planting except one.  Worked hard and decided we would go out for supper to our favorite little Japanese place about 23 miles from here. We hadn't been out to eat in a while.  I ate lunch, but the Irishman only drank the smoothie I had made for his post breakfast. He was starving. We got to Sakura's, ordered and he wolfed down his food like a mad man. I said--you must have really been hungry and he said I was starving.  We left the restaurant and drove through the movie parking lot. It was pretty crowded (we never go to Friday or Saturday night movies--yuck! Too crowded.  Only matinees for us old folks. lol We left to head home and maybe watch a movie or something.

 About 2/3 of the way home...wait.  let me digress... I am a total control freak.  I usually drive when we go somewhere, because his driving makes me crazy. I have been trying to be better. To niot nag him when he drives. To this end, on the rare occasions that he does drive, I take a book to read. That way, I am not constantly critiquing his driving.  So, like the good wife that I am (always striving to better myself) I was sitting  there in the passenger seat with my nose in a book. About 2/3 of the way home, I look up from my book and out the passenger window.  I see that he is heading for the shoulder, so I yell HEY!!  Hey HEY !!  He jerked awake and tried to pull the car back onto the pavement , but was already in the gravel. That, along with the fact that the  pavement and shoulder were about 4 inches different in height, caused the car to go into a spin across the road. I could see a car coming towards us in the other lane and I'm pretty sure I screamed (or maybe it was him) as our car went down into the ditch on the other side of the road. It was a deep ditch, next to a freshly plowed field. The little red car went into a ballet, barely missing a big electrical pole and flipping upside down and then flipping again to right itself.  Probably more of a roll than a flip. And we sat there, frozen, him wincing and groaning in pain, me just in shock. I just sat there and couldn't move. The couple in the oncoming car (along with another guy) came running up to us, saying that they were EMT's from Bunker Hill. That we should sit still and not move, that they had called 911.  I was shaking and breathing hard. The Irishman was saying that he was hurt. I could see that the windshield had shattered and there was glass shards all over me. He had a small contusion on top of his head, but it was his back/neck that was hurt. The EMT got into the backseat and stabilized his head against the head rest, telling him to breathe, deep slow breaths, because the Irishman kept saying I think I'm going to faint, everything is blue and blurry.  They tried to open his door and after much exertion, got it open. They couldn't open my door. I kept telling them I thought I was alright. Just bruised and battered. They told me to just stay put until the ambulance gets here. The sheriff was the first one to show up. He got the driver side door open, and I asked if he could please see if he could put the car on park, because that key alarm was driving me insane. You can't remove the key if it isn't in park. All the doors were ope.  DING! DING!  DING ! DING !  It was like an icepick being shoved into my eardrum.  It wouldn't budge.  Finally an ambulance showed up (it probably didn't really take long, considering we were out in the middle of nowhere, but it always seems like it, doesn't it ?) They took himself first, and said another ambulance was on the way.  He screamed as they tried to get him out of the front seat onto the backboard  and  I nearly cried.  They hauled him off to the ambulance and left. The other one showed up and they got me out the same way. It was torture. I have a very bad back and pelvis, you know, and I cannot ever lay on my back. I wound up being on that backboard for over 4 hours. I was hurting so much I was crying. At the little local hospital, which is not trauma certified, their protocol is that when this kind of thing comes in, they stabilize as much as they can, and ship the patients off to Springfield. So after a bit of a time, they call in ambulances to take us up to Springfield (a little less than an hour away).  We traveled separately, I didn't know what was happening with him, nor he with me.  Finally we arrived at the big city hospital, and you can imagine what it was like on Memorial Day weekend. In the trauma unit, they swung into action. The cut our clothes off, started IV's, hooked us up to all kinds of machinery, and put me on oxygen.  My blood pressure had skyrocketed to 220/105 and I guess they were expecting me to stroke out.  They did Cat Scans, MRI's with dye injection, x-rays.  They did lab work--blood samples and urine samples. I had asked to be catheterized before we left on the ambulance ride, because of the injuries I sustained in the industrial accident of 2001, I have sacral root nerve damage, and have no bladder or bowel control.  I didn't need any more problems or humiliation, so I asked to have the catheter put in. 

  It took forever for my blood pressure to come back down to it's normal range.  They deduced that I was beat up, but nothing was broken. that I would have quite a bit of  soft tissue injuries, but basically I was doing okay. They were waiting on all the test results to come back. I kept asking about my husband and they said he doing okay, it looked like he had a T-3 fracture. They were still waiting to find out if he would need surgery or just be able to get by with a collar and back brace.

Thank you, God. It's the brace contraption. It's a minor fracture and should heal.  We have been so blessed throughout this whole thing that I am speechless.

 More tomorrow...I am so tired...





Namaste.