I should be more careful with what I blog about. Last time around I talked about car trouble and getting out of close scrapes, not to mention my nice shiny new and newly aligned tires after a close call on the highway.
Perhaps I shouldn’t double-dog-dare karma like that. The latest call was somewhat less close. I was riding with my family in the car — home from the pumpkin patch, no less — when a series of events involving the highway, someone zooming into our lane at 90 miles an hour, and an oncoming semi led to our car being totaled, my wife with whiplash, my toddler son with a broken leg, and me with a concussion.
Guardian angel was working overtime on that one, though. If the semi had hit us at any other angle, one or more of us probably wouldn’t be here, and Kat and I are healing pretty quickly. Even little Armand Zefram Pogue turned out remarkably well — his car seat held through the whole ordeal, so he didn’t even have any muscle soreness or bruises. His leg was fractured by the back seat being crushed up against the front. But it’s a clean break, they tell us, and he should have his cast off in a week or so. Which says a lot about the healing power of little kids, I guess!
On the upside, he still loves his toy cars and very much likes his new car seat, so at least he wasn’t automobile-traumatized by the event.
You learn a whole lot about perspective when you wake up in an ambulance, on a backboard, with your little boy crying, your wife in the next ambulance, and your car looking like origami on the highway. It’s amazing who comes through when things really do go to hell like that — the insurance company that gets on the ball, the primary care family doctor who drops everything the next day to follow up on your issues, the friends who help you find an old car that, even if it’s got 189,000 miles on it, will at least get you around town while you work on getting a new one, and the trusty mechanic who’ll confirm that the car really is in as good shape as you’ve been told. Lots of people will be getting some good reports on the List after this one.
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