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Yesterday I came across an old photo album with two shots of me with a little blonde boy, Danny. I'm a teenager, he's about six. We're holding my kittens and a lop-eared rabbit.
Today, while looking up something else, I came across a comment I'd posted to one of Jim MacDonald's posts on Making Light. He's a paramedic in a rural area.
There's been an update to both my post and that photo, so I thought it was worth re-posting here, especially in light of my "car fire" thread:
Two accidents happened in July 2004.
I flipped my car off the freeway at about 65 mph, rolled it once or maybe twice. It was stopped by a clump of trees before it could continue in the direction it was heading, which would have landed it on top of an on-ramp.
The CHP officer who saw the wreck took several minutes to process what I was telling him, which was that I had been the driver. He couldn't believe I was standing on the shoulder with no visible injuries given the state of the car and the mechanism of the crash.
It turned out that I had cracked a vertebra and had chronic back pain for several years and possibly forever, though it's gotten a lot better recently. Still, I'm OK most of the time, my mobility isn't impaired, and I'm not, you know, dead. I had an airbag but it didn't go off. I was wearing my seatbelt, of course.
Later that month Danny, the 20-year-old son of some family friends was riding his bicycle when he got hit by a car at, apparently, a fairly slow speed. He was knocked down, broke his ankle but had no other injuries... except from where he hit his head on the curb. He can't walk. He can't talk. He can't eat solid food. He can't write. He's been making great progress in terms of answering questions by pointing to words on a page, though.
He lived like that for three years, but a few months ago he died. A lot of things can go wrong with the human body when it's almost completely paralyzed.
He was not wearing a helmet. I still cringe when I see helmetless bike riders.
I used to see lots of accidents when I lived in India, at a time when no car I ever encountered had a working seatbelt. At that time it had the world's highest rate of fatalities per motor vehicle accident. As a result of my time living there, I can tell you first-hand that one of the things that can happen if you get "thrown clear" is that your head and body may be thrown clear separately.
Obviously, occasionally cars catch fire. Even more occasionally, people die because their car burned and they were too badly injured or trapped by crushed metal to escape in time.
But the reason those cases always hit the papers is because they're so rare. When people get thrown from their cars and killed, or hit their heads and die three years later, it's so common that unless they're a celebrity, it's not news.
If you drive, buckle your seatbelt.
If you ride a motorcycle or bicycle, wear a helmet.
Danny would have turned 24 this year. I think I'll color-copy the snapshots I have of him and give the originals to his parents.
Today, while looking up something else, I came across a comment I'd posted to one of Jim MacDonald's posts on Making Light. He's a paramedic in a rural area.
There's been an update to both my post and that photo, so I thought it was worth re-posting here, especially in light of my "car fire" thread:
Two accidents happened in July 2004.
I flipped my car off the freeway at about 65 mph, rolled it once or maybe twice. It was stopped by a clump of trees before it could continue in the direction it was heading, which would have landed it on top of an on-ramp.
The CHP officer who saw the wreck took several minutes to process what I was telling him, which was that I had been the driver. He couldn't believe I was standing on the shoulder with no visible injuries given the state of the car and the mechanism of the crash.
It turned out that I had cracked a vertebra and had chronic back pain for several years and possibly forever, though it's gotten a lot better recently. Still, I'm OK most of the time, my mobility isn't impaired, and I'm not, you know, dead. I had an airbag but it didn't go off. I was wearing my seatbelt, of course.
Later that month Danny, the 20-year-old son of some family friends was riding his bicycle when he got hit by a car at, apparently, a fairly slow speed. He was knocked down, broke his ankle but had no other injuries... except from where he hit his head on the curb. He can't walk. He can't talk. He can't eat solid food. He can't write. He's been making great progress in terms of answering questions by pointing to words on a page, though.
He lived like that for three years, but a few months ago he died. A lot of things can go wrong with the human body when it's almost completely paralyzed.
He was not wearing a helmet. I still cringe when I see helmetless bike riders.
I used to see lots of accidents when I lived in India, at a time when no car I ever encountered had a working seatbelt. At that time it had the world's highest rate of fatalities per motor vehicle accident. As a result of my time living there, I can tell you first-hand that one of the things that can happen if you get "thrown clear" is that your head and body may be thrown clear separately.
Obviously, occasionally cars catch fire. Even more occasionally, people die because their car burned and they were too badly injured or trapped by crushed metal to escape in time.
But the reason those cases always hit the papers is because they're so rare. When people get thrown from their cars and killed, or hit their heads and die three years later, it's so common that unless they're a celebrity, it's not news.
If you drive, buckle your seatbelt.
If you ride a motorcycle or bicycle, wear a helmet.
Danny would have turned 24 this year. I think I'll color-copy the snapshots I have of him and give the originals to his parents.
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From:
no subject
My father went out for fast food one summer evening riding his bicycle. Something happened, and he crashed (no one was around). He wasn't wearing and helmet (common practice in 1980), and his brain didn't make it. I was 2 months old, and never got to know him.
My boyfriend was riding down a country road. He was hit from behind by a truck full of assholes, and went into the ditch. He was wearing a helmet. He may have a metal plate in his arm, but he has his adorable brains.
Helmets - they come in pretty colors now!
From:
no subject
> hugs! <
And I'll add my voice to the chorus of safety belt / helmet wear advocates. Far more people are killed by being thrown out of cars than by being trapped by their seatbelts, guys. (Heh, and I actually copy edited one of the studies, way back when ... .)
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I really don't understand people who ride without one; that experience was deeply, deeply unnerving.
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This is, of course, true. What I wear a helmet for are the much wider variety of accidents which are not serious but will rapidly become so with a little extra head trauma. So, yeah, right on.
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Spot-on.
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Always, always, always. I won't even pull away from the drive until everyone in the car has their seatbelts fastened. I was a passenger in a massive accident in 2001 and I'm still here to talk about it because I was wearing a seatbelt.
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My life was saved by my seatbelt when I flipped my car three times end over end at about 70 mph on a country road, into a field. I had a couple of scratches.
There is nothing more important than common sense, and the little precautions that can be miracles.
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You'd better believe we were all raised to wear bike helmets and seatbelts. All the time. I can't even back my car out ten yards from the garage into the driveway without feeling twitchy if I'm not wearing a seatbelt.
(And the one major car accident I was in, I walked away from unscathed. Yeah, I had a lot of luck on my side, but not all the luck in the world would have helped me out without a seatbelt there.)
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I don't actually believe him, but I still wear a helmet every time, all the same.
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Got back to Delhi today, though, and saw the ruins of an auto crushed by a load of bricks.
Which I guess is really just my way of saying, uh, word.
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//hugs you tightly but briefly
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The day we change to some other means of transport, nobody will be able to believe humans lived with such a toll, day after day, year after year.
Thanks for sharing, and take care.
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My sister climbed out of the car because in her adrenaline and pain-charged haze, she was convinced she'd need to flag down someone to help her. In fact, this happened on a major highway during morning rush hour; there were probably calls being placed to 911 before she'd even come to a complete stop. Several people pulled over and came running down the embankment, shouting at her not to try to move. One of them had a blanket in his car, which he wrapped her in, and then they stayed with her until the ambulance arrived with a neck brace and a back board. Which was a really good thing, because her neck was broken in two places, C2 and C7, and she wound up needing both fusion surgery and a halo brace. None of the nerves were damaged, though, so after a lengthy recovery she was able to go back to her normal life.
Thinking about her accident makes me profoundly grateful for seat belts but also for those people who stopped. They didn't even need particularly specialized skills; "treat for shock" is one of those things I learned in Girl Scouts (and have used myself to help friends and strangers on various occasions). I have no idea who they were; apparently the guy with the blankets was a construction worker.
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There was a horrible, fatal car wreck when I was in high school. It was my freshman or sophomore year, or maybe the summer between the two, and the students involved were four older boys. They were driving around town (mildly drunk, although IIRC they wouldn't have been over the legal limit for adults at the time, so under .10) and crashed their car, which burst into flames, and all four died in the fire.
The things that are weird about this, thinking back:
1. It happened on this slightly sharp curve on a residential street. Apparently they were speeding, but the speed limit along there is 25, and Madison city streets tend to be short and curvy and not well-suited to building up any sort of speed so it seems unlikely to me that they could have been going more than 40 mph.
2. I'm not sure if any were wearing seat belts, but two of them were in the back seat. Why couldn't they get out of the car in time?
3. Cars DO NOT ACTUALLY EXPLODE VERY OFTEN. This is shockingly rare and a really weird stroke of horrifying bad luck. WTF?
4. The neighbors came running out but were completely unable to do anything. I guess I'm a little surprised that no one had (or was able to make adequate use of) a fire extinguisher, garden house, ax, etc. given that the news stories said they could hear the boys screaming. I don't judge untrained people who don't go running in to pull people from burning cars; radiant heat is shocking to experience when you're not prepared for it, it feels incredibly dangerous even at a distance. But there were enough people that I guess at this point, thinking back, I'm kind of surprised that no one was able to help them. I hope the bystanders got counseling afterward because that must have been an incredibly traumatic thing to witness.
5. So much of what I remember is really weird retrospectively that I wonder if I am remembering this completely inaccurately, and in fact the boys died in a highway crash after being thrown through broken glass or who even knows. I wonder if my yearbooks mention the names so I could look it up...
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http://www.surroundedbyreality.com/Misc/Know/WHigh.asp
It was a 1982 Volvo and the gas cap came off during the slide.
I knew Jason Wilson slightly (I can't remember why; we were in some class together, I think). Michael Schoenfeld was Jewish, and my family and his were both members of the same Temple.
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The fires I saw started in a limited portion of the car and then spread from there; that's very different from if the starting point was the entire car.
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