The Accident (Warning: this story contains references to blood, gore, and death, which some individuals may find distressing)
I dreaded high school, where I’d have to start at the bottom of the coolness ladder. Not that I was a cool kid in elementary school but at least in Grade 8 I was amongst the kings and queens of the castle. After hearing about tricks the older kids played on the newcomers, like trying to sell them elevator passes at a school without elevators, I didn’t know if I’d survive my first year. Until I got mowed down by a careless 16-year-old driver and earned some infamy, maybe enough to make me cool.
The accident happened on my walk home from school on a blustery winter day in November. Northern Ontario had already been hit hard and the snowbanks were well on their way to becoming the customary towers that graced our winters. The wind made the snow dart sideways and it was an effort to keep my fur-lined hood from blowing off my head. I started crossing the busy street just outside school property and didn’t see the speeding car or remember being hit.
I must have drifted in and out of consciousness afterwards because I recalled three separate events and somehow lost the bits of time that connected them. My face was planted in a snow bank, I was on a stretcher in an ambulance (counting my fingers because I needed them for my upcoming guitar recital), and I was in a hospital emergency room. The bright overhead lights hurt my eyes, I could taste blood, and I couldn’t figure out why the nurses were trying to cut my pants off.
Students at my school, eager to impress their friends at other schools, concocted a juicy story featuring massive gobs of blood splattered all over fresh blankets of snow along with my severed head and at least one limb. There was a debate around which limb but the detached head detail was consistent. I guess it was only bragging right worthy if the tale had the appropriate amount of awe, gore, and missing body parts.
In truth, there was little blood, my limbs and head were intact and my injuries were contained to a fractured bone in my hip, a chipped tooth, and some scrapes on my face. Boring, I know. And not very cool. I was hospitalized for so long that I needn’t have counted my fingers. While I missed my much anticipated guitar recital, I was fortunate to be excused from my first set of high-school exams and ecstatic to be exempt from bloomer-clad gym classes for the rest of grade nine.
My thirty-day hospital stay was no picnic though. The only treatment for a fractured bone in the hip was lying on my back for a month, immobile from the waist down. The doctors and nurses repeatedly told me it would have been better if I’d broken my leg. I felt I needed to try harder next time I was hit by a car. Besides being injured in an inconvenient manner, my age made me a misfit of a patient. I was shuffled from ward to ward because at age fourteen, I was too old for pediatrics, too young for the broken bones floor where the average age was death, and not sick enough for the surgical floor. After being evicted multiple times I ended up in a room with two other patients on a miscellaneous ailments floor.
The Italian lady across from me had heart trouble and didn’t speak much English. I became her translator and summoned nurses when her fingernails turned blue. The bed beside me hosted a revolving cast of characters during my stay but the most memorable patient was an nonagenarian who didn’t say much and died in the middle of the night. The curtains around her bed were drawn and the family came and recited sniffling sentiments like, “Well, she lived to a ripe old age.” I held my breath and wondered if dying was contagious. I didn’t want to breathe any of it in if it was. This event resulted in a nasty phone call from my family to the hospital. Nobody else died in my room after that.
Mrs. Brown, who lived on Brown Street, was my last bed neighbour and was still there when I left. She was a petite blond woman with a gorgeous smile and cheery outlook even though a debilitating illness often landed her in hospital. When her family visited, they were kind enough to include me in their chats. I had a feeling she wouldn’t ever be a nonagenarian. I left feeling lucky I’d only been hit by a car.
When I made it back to school, more than a month had passed. I walked with crutches, putting weight on my good side and just barely putting weight on my bad side. Apparently, this was regarded as not injured enough, and the calls of “faker” echoed off the walls as I struggled to navigate the stairs in a three-story high school. An elevator pass would have come in handy.
My fellow students also singled me out because I got to leave class early to hobble to my next class. Some of them had taken the side of the driver, a popular kid from a different high school, and they resented me for the trouble he was in. It was as if it was my fault he was charged for driving without a license, changing lanes just before an intersection, and failing to yield to a pedestrian. My family had also filed action against him. His friends blamed me, reminding me how the poor kid’s life would be forever impacted.
I survived my first year and made it through high school without additional trauma, graduating with good grades, a few close friends, and the positive influence of some inspirational teachers. But I never felt like I really fit in. While being run down made me famous for awhile, it didn’t move the needle on the coolness gauge. Maybe my head rolling off into the snow bank would have tipped the scales.
