On Thursday, September 7, 2000 at 2:35 PM, Brian Carnell (
brian@carnell.com)
wrote:
>That's the weirdest part of accidents -- the way you react in shock right
>after the event.
Here's how things happened, from my perspective (as I've remembered it all
along), the day I had the accident:
I left my house, planning to go on a 35-miler. This should have taken me
through downtown Westerly, RI, out to the beaches of Misquamicut, back
through Westerly, and home again.
Instead, I left the house, rode for a couple miles, and then suddenly
Corinne was walking into the room at the Westerly Hospital, and I said,
"there she is!"
I can remember a brief flash of seeing a tan-colored car coming at me from
the left as I passed through an intersection, but it's just a flash.
I told everyone (EMT's, police, and hospital staff) that I was single and
lived in Westerly with my parents. That would have been true five years
earlier, but I'd already been married for over a year, and hadn't lived at
home for five (I lived at home for a few months when I was 20, after moving
back to RI from VT). I even gave them my old phone number! Very weird.
My parent's didn't live at the old address or phone number any more, but
thankfully the nurse was smart enough to look up my parent's current phone
number in the phone book, and called them. My Dad dropped my Mom off at the
hospital, and then went to get Corinne.
The whole time my Mother was there, I'm told, I acted like I was still 20
years old, in my worst slump ever, working at McDonalds and living at home.
What's cool, and I suppose rather romantic in a painful and bone-breaking
kind of way, is that I came back to my senses the moment Corinne walked into
the hospital room. Everybody had to tell me, all over again, what happened
to me, but that was the last time.
Seth
