January 16, 2009

• Truth or Dare

  I’m over at Old Hat‘s pajama party in my flannel jammies with the trapdoor in back, with my dog Koji at my side because I’m shy at parties.

  Mirravin suggested a game of truth or dare.  I’m in, but I can’t make up my mind whether to take a dare or tell the truth.  You tell me.

  Here’s some truth for Mirravin, who asked me about my “most hilarious hospital visit.”

  It was my son’s sixth birthday, a Sunday night.  We had been in Anchorage all weekend, where I was doing psychic readings at a music festival.  One of my sidelines was selling plants, and my VW van was loaded with stacks of wooden melon crates, most of them empty and a few holding unsold plants.  Doug’s kid safety seat was secured with custom straps his dad had installed in the back seat, behind the driver’s seat.

  After the festival closed, we picked his dad up at his place, went to Chuck E. Cheese, took Charley back home then headed out of town.  It was around 11 PM, still daylight in July.  My VW had a newly rebuilt engine and I was driving it below 30 MPH for the break-in period, very carefully.  I stopped behind several other cars at a light on Muldoon Road. 

  When the light changed, a truck pulling a big boat on a trailer was in the intersection, making a left turn across our lane from the opposite direction.  After it cleared the intersection, the cars ahead of me moved forward and I followed them.  I was in the middle of the intersection when a drunk going pretty fast decided to follow the boat around the corner and hit my VW right in front of my legs, crumpling the front end of my van back against my legs and pushing my van around the corner, leaving it in the middle of the road.

  The old van hadn’t been equipped with seat belts.  My head broke the windshield.  When I regained consciousness, Doug was crying in his seat behind me, and a crowd was standing around looking at me through the windshield.  My door was jammed shut and there were crates piled on the passenger seat, so I crawled out through the broken windshield.  Later on, when I saw the wreck in the junkyard, I couldn’t figure how I’d gotten out, because the front wall was smack up against the seat, no space at all.

  I couldn’t put any weight on the left leg, so people helped me to the side of the road.  I asked someone to get Doug out of the car, and soon he was running around in his usual ADHD style, only this time he had one shoe on and one shoe off, until an ambulance came and took us to the hospital.

  It was a good thing I had ID, because for a while I couldn’t remember my name.  The amnesia was one of the things that made the incident so funny.  Doug was the other thing.  They needed to take me into X-ray, and somebody told me they’d look after my son because he couldn’t go in there with me.  They examined him, taking off his shirt and putting him in a little backless johnny, and left him single-shod.  When they were finished checking him for injuries, they sat him on a chair in the ER hallway and told him to wait.

  Yeah, right.  He saw an elevator door open down the way and went on down and rode the elevator for a while.  Nobody knew where he was, and while I was obliviously being manipulated this way and that for pictures of my insides, hospital security was searching for a missing child whose name they didn’t even know.  He walked into an EKG lab on an upper floor, and the technician in there entertained him by hooking him up and checking his heart, letting him watch the needles jump and trace his heartbeats, while he got on the phone to the pediatrics ward to see if they were missing a patient.

  I was on a gurney in the hallway when security finally caught up with Doug and brought him back to ER, with a length of EKG tracing trailing from one hand.  I think he still has that souvenir somewhere.  The story becomes less hilarious from here, and my knees have never been the same since, but as often happens with such occurrences, there were gains from the accident that outweighed the losses in the long run.

  • 10:42 pm
  • 6 Comments