Crash

About 17 years ago, when I was 20 years old, I was working at Payless Drug Store as the head cashier. I lived in the country about 15 minutes from our little town of Elk Grove, CA. I was renting a room from a lady who lived in a trailer on the edge of a farm.

I had a bad habit of staying out late with my friends and had a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. I also had/have a bad habit of being addicted to the adrenaline rush of trying to beat the clock. In a perverse sort of way I like to run late and to try to do everything at once and beat the clock and somehow make it to work on time. Brush my teeth while washing my hair, put on my shoes while driving, I like testing my wits and overcoming all odds. Needless to say I was late just about everyday.

On this particular morning it was incredibly foggy. I couldn’t see past the hood of my car. As I was driving to work I somehow got behind a school bus. The school bus was driving even slower than I was. So I turned down a side road in order to get around the bus, I wasn’t dumb enough to try to pass the bus on a country road in the fog, but I was dumb enough to take a side street with which I was only vaguely familiar. It was already past the time I was supposed to be at work and I was going much faster than I should have been going. I somehow missed the sign saying stop sign ahead and all of a sudden I saw the stop sign. I actually saw it while my car sped by. So I slammed on my breaks. Both feet on the floor as hard as I could. Before me a tree emerged from the fog. I pushed down on the breaks even harder. Somehow I managed to stop the car before I crashed head on into a tree.

I had never been so scared. My life passed before my eyes. About half way through my sigh of relief I heard a very loud noise. I felt an incredible jarring and the entire car was all of a sudden spinning. It all happened in slow motion. I had stopped the car in the middle of the street while trying to avoid hitting the tree. There was a truck driving down the road. I had been traveling down a side road the ended into another road. Not stopping at the stop sign had sent me into the middle of this cross street. A truck had been driving down that street and couldn’t stop in time. He hit my back end causing me to spin around in a couple of circles. That noise, the knowledge that I had been hit, it all happened so suddenly so unexpectedly. I had been just then letting out a sigh of relief from avoiding a head on collision with a tree. What a roller coaster of emotions and stress all that up and down in less than a minute.

Perhaps you have been through something similar. A car crash or some other circumstance that unhinged you. It took me over a month for the nightmares to stop. I would be doing my job and something would cause the whole incident to come back over me. My heart would race the adrenaline would rush. I had a hard time getting over it. It did eventually go away. As I type this I can remember the accident without it causing me to physically relive the turmoil.

Every time I get into my car there is a part of me that knows that more American’s die in car crashes than in any other way. I know this but I don’t think about it. I don’t spend any time in a state of panic or fear. I do my best to avoid an accident and wear seat belts, and put the little one in a car seat, other than that I don’t give the danger of the situation a second thought. However, right after my accident I was in a state of constant panic, not just in the car but all the time. I felt as if the safety and security of the world I lived was gone. I had the constant sense that at any moment the sky would fall and something horrid would happen. I guess my internal equilibrium was a bit off.

I wonder if this is what happens to my friends and the husbands of my friends who spend time in Iraq? Imagine having that car crash feeling everyday for months, what would that do to your sense of equilibrium in the world. If it took me a month or two to recover from one little car crash I wonder how long it takes to recover from a year in Iraq?