The Survival Chronicles part 1
The doctors told my mother that I would never walk again. They also told her that I would have difficulties with basic cognitive functions for the rest of my life. They told her that I would be emotionally handicapped. From all the comments she heard, the prognosis was grim.
19 years ago, I was involved in a car accident. My car slid into on-coming traffic on a wet road between Morgantown and Reedsville West Virginia. The passenger’s side of the vehicle was completely destroyed. Something hit me in the back-right side of my head lacerating it and leaving a wound in the shape of a fish hook from just above my ear to the back of my head.
The man whose car I slammed into was my sister’s close friend’s father. Two men drove up and stopped to assist. One was my seventh grade science teacher and the other was my neighbor’s son. They took dirty laundry from the backseat and used it to compress the bleeding wound on my head. One of them undid my seat belt and restrained me until the ambulance arrived.
The ambulance arrived some time later and drove me towards the hospital. While in the ambulance, my lungs stopped working and EMT’s had to assist me with breathing. Because of heavy traffic in Morgantown, the paramedics stopped at a bridge and I was picked up in a helicopter and flown to the university medical center ten miles away. In the mean time, my father was called and was present in the emergency room when I arrived. As I lay in ICU, my mother sobbed for hours. Different nurses and technicians came around to discuss their observations. Not one of them stated my future was good.
A short time later, my father was reviewing the charts when he noticed that I was on a blood thinner even though doctors had determined that I had a brain bruise. He went ballistic! According to my mother, he walked into the hallway with my chart in his hand, walked up to the nurses desk and began slamming the chart against the desk while screaming for answers from specific doctors and technicians. She said his voice was so loud and filled with anger that nurses and personnel began to run through the hall to avoid him. I suspect he saved my life. The problem was soon rectified and I was on the road to a long recovery.
That recovery took me at least two years to reach a point of normalcy. For those two years, I fought to recover from the effects of that accident. The trauma and stress resulting from those experiences has shaped my character much more than any other event in my life up until that time.
In the midst of these terrible events, other strange events occurred. The first odd happening transpired a few days before the accident. I had been due to drive two of my rowing teammates to Philadelphia for the weekend, but in the lead up to the departure I began experiencing a deep feeling of dread. The dread was so intense that I opted out of going with them that weekend. I literally had the feeling that I was going to die. On the night I decided to not drive them, I wrote an email to a high school English teacher with the subject line “When I am scared.” After reviewing my inbox three months later, I found that particular email.
My car was completely destroyed. The pictures my sister and father took of it showed the entire passenger side caved in. My teammates would have sat in that space because of my leg length. Or equally as bad, if one of them had been driving, I would have sat in that space. Would the accident have happened if I had decided to go with them. I don’t know for sure. Logic and probability would indicate no — especially since they lived somewhere else.
Perhaps, the accident was fate. An atheist would scoff at such a notion. Destiny is a fairy tale, he or she would tell me. Phenomena happen and they are a part of life. People suffer and die but there is always a plausible explanation. What we don’t know now will eventually be known. Science and rational thinking will eventually prevail in providing us with explanations.
But I don’t believe that. I can’t believe it because of irrational and inexplicable experiences that I had. According to the stories I heard from my mother, father, and others, five days after the accident, my condition was poor. I was still in intensive care and my family was distraught. I was not recovering and my body was still physically damaged with cuts in my liver and lungs.
One evening, my father went to a prayer group and gave a testimony about my condition and all of the members prayed. They sang, spoke in tongues and called to the divine. As they were finishing, a woman named Virginia looked to my father and stated: “Tom, Ben will wake up tomorrow and he’s going to be angry.” My father was aghast at her remark because he had seen my progress and could not imagine anything of the sort. One of his friends then told him “Virginia has the gift of prophecy.”
The next morning, the phone rang around 6.45. My father picked up of the phone and I began yelling at him to come down to the hospital to get me. He immediately got up, got dressed and drove to the hospital. I found out later that I had called my neighbors first.
At that point, I began to recover. The next day: Thursday, I have my first memory. I remember waking up in the hospital seeing a friend of mine. We talked a bit and that was it.
Soon afterwards, I was transferred to a rehabilitation clinic for three weeks. I shared a room with a pastor who had fallen off a roof and sustained such a severe head injury that he could only blink his eyes.
After a day at the clinic, I was bored. I would listen to my cd player until my ears hurt from the earpieces. Then I would read until my eyes hurt. I had this immense amount of energy that would be punctuated by frequent naps. Afterwards, I would get up and walk around the hospital and speak to anyone I could. I repeated this cycle for more than three weeks.
Three weeks later, I was permitted to attend day therapy and went home in early November, and continued to go to the rehab clinic five days a week for the next two months.
By December, I decided against medical advice to return to college. I was told to take the minimal amount of hours possible and to relax. I did the opposite, I took the maximum number of hours that I could and tried to make up for that lost semester.
Returning to college in January, I had many expectations. I expected to be welcomed back and to be free of the burden that the accident had given me. I craved normalcy and the need to belong somewhere. While in the hospital, so many people had prayed for my well being and recovery that I really felt special. But when I returned in a semi-healthy state, people were just too busy in their own lives that I often felt that I did not belong. It was in the winter months and days were short, cold, and dark.
The experiences of the first year after the accident were hell. It was simply hell.
First, recovering from a brain bruise caused my temper to be volatile. If someone looked at me askew, I had to suppress my rage and often couldn’t. Second, I was very lonely. Before the accident, I had gone to rowing practice every afternoon and then had dinner with the team. After the accident, I often found myself alone with people whom I did not know. I would see my friends in the evenings but they had their own lives and I was no longer sharing their experiences. Third, I was restless. I wanted to make progress and do something. I wanted to heal and be healthy again. Mainly I wanted to feel good and not have the specter of the accident hanging over me at every moment.
Slowly, I recovered. The next summer, I flew out to Wyoming and hiked in Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons and camped in the wilderness, and in national parks. It was fantastic. That summer I saw the Milky Way while camping in Teton National Forest. I talked with different people and learned to be on my own.
While on the flight to Denver, I met a doctoral student who told me about Middlebury Language schools and I applied to go the German school that next summer in 2000. I was accepted and attended the program, which led me to get a certificate to Teach English, which led me to study linguistics.
Through the process of recovery, I began to figure things out. I learned to be comfortable with myself and to live with the events that had torn my life apart.
On December 31st 1999, my family had a New Years Eve party. We partied with neighbors and friends and colleagues and we celebrated the end of the millennium. On TV, people waited in Jerusalem for the Messiah to return and world celebrated the new millennium. We expected to wake up on January 1st to a world changed by Y2K. Perhaps, we would have had nuclear armageddon because the computers failed. We didn’t know but we partied still.
I woke up on January 1st with a hangover. I had partied first at my parents and then at my neighbors. That spring semester,I took a few courses in geology and in the beginning of that summer I went on a 10-day field trip to Utah to dig for dinosaurs with my class. In Utah, we camped in the desert and broke stone under the dry sun.
One morning, I woke up to the most amazing sunrise I had ever seen. For a brief moment, I felt an inner peace unlike anything over the previous two years. From that time forward, not only did my health recover but my spirit healed as well.
Later that summer, I went to Middlebury Vermont and studied German for seven weeks. It was there that I discovered my talent for learning languages. I met really interesting people and had a good time. I suppose that my Mormon roommate was not too happy because I literally celebrated life as much as I could for seven weeks. I played chess every day and tried reading Hermann Hesse in German.
After those two hellacious years, it was time to let go and embrace life again and that I did.
When I returned to Marietta that fall, the school had just offered a new program to teach English as a Foreign Language. I registered for it and took the necessary courses. I was the first to graduate from the program.
By October 9, 2000, my life and my recovery seemed to be on the right track. I had found a purpose and a drive to do something. But at that point, my father had terminal cancer and would die six months later. With his death, I would need another two years before I could finally feel whole.
For those two years though, I had collected a series of positive and negative experiences that have shaped me positively. 19 years ago, I had a naive sense of life and the future. But a car crash doused my worldview with a cold, hard dose of reality.
Too often, I have wondered about the reasons for the accident and why I survived. I have wondered why I chose to go home rather than going to Philadelphia and Atlantic City. I have also wondered often what would have happened had I gone elsewhere that day.
After escaping death, survival and recovery did not mean walking hand-in-hand in the promised land. It was a challenge to heal and the experience shaped me. How could it not?
In the two years after the accident, life was difficult. I experienced a lot of anger, depression, and frustration and sometimes I acted out. Sometimes I threw fits and quite a few times, I wanted to quit because the experience was too damned hard to deal with. But I didn’t.
19 years ago on October 9th, 1998, I stood at the gates of hell but turned back. How much of this decision was choice, fate, divine intervention, science, or the assistance from other people; I will never know.
At some point, a choice had to be made. The nurses and technicians who told my mother that my life would never be much afterwards had to be wrong. The story just could not end with me lying in some vegetative state and seeing the glory of my life fade at 19. And thankfully, it didn’t!