Things expected and unexpected

I expected today to be a bad day. I had a feeling….

But, I was wrong about what would go wrong.

This morning, I opened the Email and found that I had indeed gotten a direct deposit to my checking account, a pay check from my new job. It was more than enough to pay the car insurance due today – and I was afraid I’d have a lapse in coverage and would not be able to drive my car.

If I drive without insurance…well, The last time I did that was in April of 1998, and I was drinking, said drinking being related to a disaster that had taken more than half my pay checks from the job I had then, and it would continue, that deduction, until the end of time, it looked like.

Very suddenly, I went from Low-Paid and poor to absolutely broke.

I wasn’t so broke that I could not buy that half gallon of cheap bourbon. I was so angry at my fate that apparently I drank a good third of that half gallon and then decided I NEEDED to drive downtown to see my friend, who was working that night. Somewhere along the line, I took or made a phone call regarding the deductions from my pay, and my friend Jhni, whom I had called or who called me, said something that made me so angry that I threw the phone through a closed window, shattering the gas and sending the phone wheeling into the backyard, where the other residents of the house were having a Garden Party. (drinking beer in the garden, don’tcha know)

Apparently, the landlord’s husband came upstairs to find out what I thought I was doing, and I fled down the stairs past him and ran to the car I had bought the week before, a 1985 Mercury Marquis. I’m told (why I had to be told is going to be obvious soon) that I raced off in a cloud of tire and oil smoke.

I did not get far. The Morrison Bridge, one of ten that crosses the river here, was less than two miles away. That bridge was infamous for it’s expanded steel decking, which was like ice when it rained, and apparently it was raining enough so that when I hit the bridge at 900 miles an hour, I lost control of the car and slid it into (oh, but not OVER) the sides of the bridge.

The car was destroyed. Totally, absolutely, irrevocably.

I almost died, pinned in the wreckage. The engine apparently slid back into the passenger compartment, I hit that hard, and it pinned me in my seat and chewed up my left thigh, breaking that leg. I was wearing my seat belt, but the shoulder mounting on the car had a weak bolt securing it, and that bolt broke, allowing me to be flung into the dashboard and causing internal injuries, collapsing both lungs.

Those turned out to be "minor" injuries compared to the others I suffered. I hit my head so hard, they say, that my brain split into three pieces and that left me in a coma that I didn’t wake up from for almost six weeks. It took them nearly an hour to cut me out of the car and get me up the hill to the trauma center at OHSU. I lost 45 days, both before and after the wreck.

I did not hurt, thank God, anyone else.

When I woke up, almost six weeks later, I didn’t know my own name, had no idea why I was in a hospital, and could not stand or remember anything about myself. They had to tell me, over the course of the next months, why I was there, what I had done, and who I used to be.

I did not have car insurance, and I had been drinking heavily, and it was all but inevitable that the crash would have happened sooner or later. Before that, life had gotten very bad; it sucked, as a matter of fact, and it wasn’t with too much surprise that I heard them ask me, "did you do it on purpose?"

I didn’t, not that I hadn’t been thinking of how badly my life had gone off the rails, and I had been drinking and driving because I did not care and was past the end of my rope. It was decided that I had had a breakdown, maybe an "episode", and may not have done it on purpose, at least not consciously when I was "normal", but that I had snapped, due to extreme anger and too much bourbon.

I did have, however, insurance through my employer, Gold-Plated insurance, as it turned out, and even though it took me over 4 years to recover enough to try to work again, I was able to because I had that good insurance, and they took VERY good care of me.

Good care to the tune of $256,000. A quarter-million dollars, in 1998 dollars.

When I had come to the Trauma Center, it wasn’t known whether or not I would live, die, or be a vegetable for the rest of my life. That Gold-Plated insurance made, I believe, all the difference in the world for me and my recovery. I was in such a bad way, and with no family or wife or much of any associations, that they tried an experimental treatment on my Traumatic Brian Injury, using a hyperbaric chamber and pure oxygen to flood my injured brain and body with oxygen under pressure, also reducing the swelling that accompanies brain injuries, which shove the brain up against the bone of the skull and which causes more damage and more loss of neural connections.

"I" was not there. At all. I wasn’t there for a month and a half. I don’t know "where" I was; I had no sense of "self", of "me", and time did not pass because I was not aware of time anymore nor of who I was. I don’t remember any great pain, although there surely was some, and I don’t remember anything at all from that period. I woke up, and it was June, not April.

That was 15 years ago, in 1998. I went from the hospital, the third one I had been in, I learned, to an Adult Foster Care Home. Apparently, in the second place I had been, I had become "perturbed" and had ripped out every wire and tube stuck into my body I guess I caused myself some more damage – more scars which I will carry the rest of my life.

I recovered "enough", after 9 months, to move out of the Foster Home and into this apartment, having re-learned how to take care of myself, shower, fix food, use the telephone, and walk.

I have done better than expected. The experimental treatment has been shown to be less than effective for other people, but I guess it worked for me; I am "still here" and have been denied Disability many times over the 15 years that have passed.

I graduated from College in the summer of 2000. less that a year and a half after the wreck, having down almost three years of classes before the wreck, and having done most of ‘the hard stuff" before then too.

It turns out that I owe that to myself, I suppose. I had had, before the wreck, a very high IQ, and although I lost a significant fraction of that IQ, I wasn’t wrecked myself, or, no

t too much, anyway.

***

That all happened because I had been defaulted into paternity of a teenager, the child of a woman I had had a one-night stand with after Navy Boot Camp. I had been cleared of that in 1983, by a blood test, and had forgotten all about it until I was served with papers at work, in 1997. With the default, they began taking over half my pay, and I could no longer afford anything after paying the rent.

To say I was angry is an understatement. To say I was stupid is stating the obvious. To say that I am lucky is something the doctors and nurses will vehemently deny; they would say, and did, that it wasn’t "luck" that saved my life, it was their skills and "modern medicine".

Still, I feel lucky to be here, as whole as I am and as intelligent as I still am.

It could be worse.

***

That event has given me a kind of clairvoyance.

I "knew" something bad was going to happen today. It was most likely going to be losing my car insurance, because I was short on money and a direct debit from my checking account was set to happen tonight. I can’t drive without insurance; doing that had cost me a three year suspension on my license.

Not that I really cared anymore about that – I had killed my car and had lost most all of my few savings before they declared part of the medical debt "Uncollectable". The Paternity judgement did not go away, and I was stuck with an ever-escalating debt I could not pay because I was unable to work, and marked as a "deadbeat dad".

I am still paying that off, and have been for 16 years.

***

Until today.

Today brought me unexpected news: My pay check had been direct-deposited to my bank and instead of waiting till the insurance company took it, I went online and paid it myself. I was convinced that the bad thing to happen today was related to my car, the car I bought new, 4 years ago, in "better days", when I drove a school bus as a Union driver. I knew I wouldn’t be able to drive my beloved car until I paid for the insurance, and was unhappy about that, and wrote about it here on OD.

After I took care of the insurance and made a few calls to spread the good news, I went downstairs to go buy a pizza at Papa Murphy’s. I checked the mail before I drove up there (Yay, I CAN drive!) and found cash in the mail that one of my OD friends had sent me. Money in the mail is one of my favorite things, I’ll tell you with a straight face.

The "disaster" that happened today? That I felt looming out there? It was this: It is a HOT day in Portland today, windless, stiflingly HOT. My fan had begun making an alarming sound last night as it ran, and, feeling it, the motor was hot. I turned it off and lamented that the fan I NEEDED was dangerous now, that that sound and heat meant it could start a fire, and that I had only a little money left after paying for the car insurance.

Oh, no, I’m not short on money! I had enough to go the the True Value hardware store near Papa Murphy’s and to BUY a new fan for $25.00.

Huzzah! I sweated all night last night and that new fan is blowing COOL air over me now. I won’t have to suffer bravely tonight.

***

That letter full of twenties is not, however, the only thing I found in the mail box today.

I found a form letter from the County in California that has been taking money from me for 16 years. Although I still owe money on that, (oh, but the end is in sight, now that I have a job – it should be paid by the end of the year!) the letter announced that they were cancelling the debt, that they were done taking my money, that it was OVER, the long nightmare that I have been living with, had become reconciled with, had come to accept as "my reality".

Done, Done for good. It is over.

***

I was wrong in my fears for the day; it is not a BAD day, it is a VERY GOOD day.

A very very very very good day.

The best day in a very long while.

This cat is FREE again.

Mee fucking oow!

 

*****