So, I'm just a wee bit behind on the blog posting scene. So sorry for all the things that I was going to post that I have since forgotten because you will never be enlightened by them. This post should be about our trip to Russia, and I'll get to that one eventually, but instead it's going to be a therapeutic journal entry about what I have since referred to as "one more page in the Russia trip scrapbook". It may be a bit long and the pictures are gruesome, but you are under no obligation to read to the end. So, here we go.
We arrived back from Russia on Thursday, July 19. The flight was long, but not horrible, thanks to my dad, who paid extra for us to have four more inches of leg room. We flew over Greenland! I don't know what I thought Greenland looked like, but I didn't know it looked like it does. When I get to the Russia post I'll put some pictures in or maybe I'll put them in with this post. Anyway. . .
We flew in and out of JFK because Kelly stayed in NYC with Meg and Zach, my nephew who lives in Connecticut, went with us. (He's a GREAT traveling companion BTW, if you ever need one. He's fearless, friendly and from what I saw in 10 days, ALWAYS in a good mood.) Friday morning we loaded the car for the 11 hour drive home from Connecticut. I hadn't slept well the night before so Tom said he could do most of the driving, but not all of it. I asked to drive first, because I was feeling pretty good when I got out of bed and figured I'd be freshest then.
We were cruising along nicely. We'd been on the road for 4 hours and were nearing Lock Haven, Pennsylvania when I saw three lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic ahead. I started slowing down, anticipating a future stop. Five or ten seconds later there was an enormous noise and a hard jolt. I have to make some assumptions here because everything happened so fast. I flew forward and back and then thought, "OH MY GOSH! We just got rear-ended." The car was propelled forward from the impact and I remember feeling an urgent need to stop the car, but I was momentarily disoriented and I couldn't find the brake peddle. Then everything cleared, I figured out what to do and I pulled over to the left shoulder as I was in the far left lane and there was a semi next to me on the right.
I knew my nose was bleeding so I asked Craig to get me some tissues and stangely calm, told him where they were. I told everyone I thought my nose was broken. Then I put the tissues up to my nose and the whole thing moved in a circle. That's when I said, "I know my nose is broken."
Kelly was a little freaked out. I had turned when asking Craig to get the tissues and she had seen blood all over my face. I did not know at that time that I had a gash on my nose. She asked if I was okay. I assured her that I was, I just had a broken nose. Then I put the seat back slightly and put my head back as I was starting to feel intense pain.
Tom had jumped out of the car. The kids asked if they should get out, but I told them to stay in their seats and to keep their seat belts on. I had taken my seat belt off immediately after the accident, thinking that I was going to get out. I went to put it back on figuring I was better off if someone else hit us, but it was too tight and I couldn't rebuckle it. It was locked so I couldn't retract it and try again. Other cars were driving past quite slowly, but I thought that I hadn't gotten all the way off the road. I was suddenly paranoid that we would be hit again and felt an urgent need to move the car. I didn't feel I could do it and was going to have Tom do it, but that would have necessitated my getting out of the front seat and I knew there was no way I could do that so I started up the car and inched over to the left. The shoulder was quite narrow and there was an embankment which made me nervous. I did what I could do, turned off the car, then put my head back.
Tom had called 911. As we waited my need to cry outweighed my desire to not worry the kids by crying. It was a silent, shoulder-shake cry of disbelief. It didn't last long, but it did relieve the tension. I could not believe we had been in an accident.
Emergency vehicles started arriving. The police got there first. I could hear Tom talking to the state trooper. He asked if we were stopped when we were hit. Tom said, "Yes," but I yelled, "No," because we were still moving at the time. I thought it was odd that I was acting like nothing had happened, which means I was butting into other people's conversations when they got the details wrong. The trooper never did talk to me, but that's because the EMS had arrived and had gone to work. I immediately asked for a cold pack. It was the only thing that could help me right then. The EMT was asking me questions and I could hear them working on Kelly. She complained of neck pain so they put a neck brace on her on were working on getting her on a back board so they could take her out the rear of the car. I heard someone say, "Does she have any allergies or significant medical history?" The mom in me kicked in and I yelled, "She had surgery a month ago. Did she tell you that?" Someone answered that she had and I went back to being a patient.
They put a neck brace on me as a precaution since I had whipped forward, then I stood up and slowly walked to the gurney. I was glad to be out of the car and on my way to where they could give me some pain med. The pain was intense and I'm sure I was in shock, but as they rolled me to the ambulance I asked Tom to grab my purse and iPad.
They put me in the ambulance and we waited until they knew if Tom and Craig had a ride to the hospital. I could then see that they had closed down the interstate. There was a fire truck parked across the road and car debris was everywhere. I could see the smashed in front end of the other car and asked if anyone in the other car was hurt. The EMT didn't know. Tom and Craig climbed in the back and then I got all worried because that meant Kelly was riding in an ambulance alone. Too late. Her ambulance had already left.
It was a bumpy ride. I finally rolled over on my side because I could lift my head better to ease the bumping and it felt better on my nose. Also, the blood kept pooling in my throat and I was desperate to not swallow it. I had to keep spitting in out. Pretty gross.
I felt completely overwhelmed again and told the EMT, "I need to cry." She said, "That's okay. Go ahead. This time I cried it all out, after apologizing to Craig for his having to see his mother like this. It was so weird to me to be rational about those kinds of things. I guess a mom never really shuts down.
The ER is sort of a blur. I don't really remember what order things happened. I remember a nurse coming in and the first thing I asked was, "Where's Kelly?" She was in the cubicle next door, so we could talk, but not see each other. Craig went over there to be with her. Tom stayed with me and held my spit basin so I could spit up the blood. I remember asking for an ice bag and asking Tom to call my mom. He told me he couldn't right then. He needed some time to compose himself. He was probably in shock too. After a few minutes he called my mom. She called his parents, my brother, my sister and the temple to put our names on the prayer roll. I asked him if he had any oil for a blessing. He searched his briefcase and came up empty handed so I asked him to give me a blessing anyway, which he did. The only thing I remember him saying was something about easing the pain. I didn't know it because I had an ice bag on my face and couldn't see anything, but Tom slipped out and gave Kelly a blessing of comfort. She was quite traumatized and worried about me. She told Tom later that the blessing really helped.
I asked Tom to use my iPad and take some pictures of me. I wanted to see what I looked like. Oh my. I looked awful! They had given me a clamp for my nose so I wouldn't have to hold it. It seemed to pull my nose out. It looked like a fat sausage!
The CT scan confirmed that I had fractured both bones in my nose. The doctor also informed me that I needed stitches. That was the first I learned of the gash on my nose.
At some point the nurse produced a much sought after morphine syringe. Oh man, everything was so much better after that. Oddly it never wore off, which I'll explain later. They washed the blood off my face and stitched up my nose. The numbing stuff stings, but I'm sure it beats feeling someone sew you up.
Kelly had been checked over and found to be fine so she was released. She and Craig went to the waiting room to wait. While they were there a couple of the people in the other car came up to them and apologized for what had happened. They said that no one in their car had been seriously injured. A girl was wearing an ankle brace, but that was the worst of it, I think.
By now Meg was texting me. She had called her bishop to get the name of the local bishop. She had called him. He was a couple of hours away, but heading back to town and was trying to find the RS president to help us if we needed it. Meanwhile Tom was working with the staff at the hospital to find a car rental place and a hotel. The car rental did not want to do a one-way rental, but the girl asked her manager and it just so happened that they had one car left that had already come from another dealership so they let us rent that one. The hotels in town were both full so we had to go 20 miles down the road to find one.
The accident happened at 1:15. At 6 we finally left the hospital. Kelly wasn't too sure about getting into a car, but there was no choice. We stopped by the lot where our car had been towed to get all our stuff out. That's when I saw the damage for the first time. Wow. The pictures don't really show it well. I was going to tell Tom to take the BYU Alumni license plate frame off the car, but then I saw the plate and frame. Completely non-reusable.
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What I woke up to the morning after the accident.
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Tom got me settled in at the hotel, then took thekids to pick up dinner. They brought it back to the room and after we ate he set out to get my perscriptions filled. One was an anti-biotic and the other was for pain. He was back two minutes later. He had stopped at the front desk to ask where to find a pharmacy, but they told him they were all closed. I looked at my watch. It was 9:02pm. Most pharmacies close at 9. All I could think was I had to get through the night without any pain med. Tom got some acetaminofin from the front desk. I took a couple for good measure, then tried to sleep. I was not successful, but I wasn't in pain. In fact, I did not feel pain again until after I had surgery a week later.
It took 7 hours to get home the next day. We had been gone for 2 weeks so of course the fridge didn't have any thing in it. I made a list for Tom and then, without thinking because the mom in me had kicked in again, I started doing laundry.
That night it occured to me that since I wasn't in pain, theoretically I could go to church the next day. I wondered if it was my pride or my fear of scaring the children that had me hesitant to go. In the morning it didn't matter. I woke up with puffy, violet circles around both eyes and I felt lousy. I crashed while Tom and the kids went to church.
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| My Sunday morning face. |
Meg had hunted down our RS presidency and meals were arranged until my mom arrived on Friday. I remember lying on the couch feeling very grateful that dinner was coming and I didn't have to worry about it. My mother-in-law had told my mother, who passed it on to me, that I had been through something traumatic and I needed to take whatever service people were willing to do for me. I knew she was right and didn't fight it, which was a real blessing.
A week after the accident I had surgery to put my nose back in place. That's a whole other story. Thankfully my mom came for nearly three weeks to get us through that. In brief, I spent the first 54 hours post-op in a recliner with a cold compress on my face, popping Vicodin and trying to manage a splitting headache. Maybe I'll get to that story and maybe I won't. Fortunately the human body is amazing and heals quite quickly. I have a frowny-face scar on my nose, but otherwise look pretty good. I certainly can't complain. We all walked away. A broken nose is a small price to pay for that.
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| Four day post-op |
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| My nose looks a bit crooked here, but it's not really. |
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