Getting Into a Car Crash Sucks: The Definitive Review

This morning, August 7th, I woke up screaming and clutching my chest. I’ve been having variations of the same nightmare at least once a week for about a month. The story gets worse! On July 3rd, I had woken up just fine. Tired, but fine. I had plans to marathon a few movies with my girlfriend that afternoon so I figured I’d take care of a few errands first. Depositing some cash, getting dishwasher soap, that sort of thing. I try to not use the rideshare apps if I can help it, because I’ve never liked cars or wasting money. But I was just too tired, especially after walking around trying to find an ATM that wasn’t out of order. I’m mad at myself now for getting a ride home but it’s not like I could’ve known that as I was getting into the back of the rideshare, a man in the next town over had sideswiped someone sitting motionless in their vehicle.

A fantastic maneuver, we can all agree. Continuing on with his streak of good decision making, he slams on the gas to get himself away from the scene he caused and blasts off down the highway. He’s swerving around cars, careening down I-80 just to avoid a fine of maybe 200 bucks. I wonder what was going through his head as he took the exit that led to my neighborhood. Because he definitely wasn’t thinking about slowing down to the posted 25 MPH. He was going nearly double the limit entering the intersection I was also about to be in the middle of.

This is where things get a little fuzzy for me on account of nearly dying. It’s a short drive from where I was to my house, so I figured I wouldn’t use up too much data if I listened to the Cubs game on my phone. I had the volume turned down to the lowest audible setting and pressed the speaker to my ear. We were losing, probably. The offense just hasn’t gotten the job done this year. I kept listening anyway as we crested the hill and crossed into the last 4-way intersection before we reached my house. One second, everything was normal and my mind was on what the team should do before the trade deadline. The next second, I’m not even sure where my mind went.

The sideswiper upgraded to a T-boner. 45-50 MPH head-on collision for him. Couldn’t have happened to a better guy. The rideshare driver and I got even luckier, considering. He slammed into us in back behind the driver, allowing us both to avoid a direct hit (as I was sitting behind shotgun). Nobody died, somehow. Wish we had gotten luckier though.

I have been through so much in my life, so much trauma. This was one of the most surreal bad experiences I’ve ever had. I’m much more used to trauma being coldly dished out over the course of many years, not in a hot messy instant. I also have a jumble of sensations and feelings more than solid memories of the incident itself and its immediate aftermath. It’s hard to describe a lot of what I experienced… The little I remember before I lost consciousness still gets my heart racing to think about and forms the bulk of why my new nightmares are so miserable. My vision disappeared and blinked back in an instant, but extremely blurry. If I had to paint what I saw, it would look like a really unsettling Rothko. Evil grey and vivid crimson. There was so much noise I couldn’t process it—it sounded like a high-pitched ringing but I knew there was more sound underneath it. It felt like we were spinning for 10 minutes. My head felt like it was underwater for 20. I didn’t have the cliche moment of my life flashing before my eyes though. There was no time for that. I thought… well, for what felt like an eternity but was probably less than a second, I thought I was already dead. Not dead so much as just… not there. I wasn’t breathing but it was more than that. More than dissociation too, way more intense. I was gone and I knew I was gone. Then, everything went black. Not ideal!

Next thing I know, I’m yelling on the ground in immense pain and a nurse is hovering above me (I learned later that we happened to crash right near where her house is, which explains how she got there so quick. It was baffling at the time and made me think I was unconscious for much longer than I was lol). I’m spitting out bits of teeth and broken glass and begging someone to go up a block to my house and tell my girlfriend. Then my memory fades out again, and comes back when I’m in an ambulance, a bit before cracking a joke about fentanyl with the EMT.

Quick sidebar: fentanyl is amazing. I get the hype now, best painkiller I’ve taken since the crash. Will not be seeking out the street stuff, don’t worry. If you’ve experienced severe physical trauma, I highly recommend the hospital stuff. I’m giving fentanyl 5 bags of popcorn.

Anyway, another thing I learned later is that for some reason, I refused to get into the ambulance at the scene. A neighbor very carefully drove me up to my house as I was assuring her that I’d be fine after a quick nap. This was a lie and I have no idea why I was telling it. Maybe I believed it at the time. She was doubtful and told my girlfriend what happened and that she almost definitely needed to call 911. My girlfriend took one look at me and heard how I was rambling incoherently and agreed. She described me later as being “loopy”.

I definitely had some sort of head injury but that wasn’t all! After 28 hours in the hospital, I emerged with a number of fun diagnoses, including but not limited to: contusion of the abdominal wall, aortic wall stranding (but no dissection or extravasation), right lumbar 5 transverse process fracture/left lumbar 1 transverse process fracture, I got 4 chipped teeth, my joints hurt more than usual, and a huge hematoma lump underneath my sternum that 2 separate doctors looked at last week and said “Oh, wow” when they first saw it. That’s right, it’s STILL ON MY CHEST OVER A MONTH LATER IT’S MAKING ME GO INSANE. But yeah, heart and spine injuries. Even after all that, I’ll live! And with not even a lot of physical therapy, I’ll be fine! I got lucky as hell.

Since then, my brain has been subjecting me to variations of the car crash while I’m trying to sleep. Sometimes the nightmare will be a simple replay of what actually happened with dream logic filling in the gaps, but the more interesting ones are different scenarios that suddenly become the crash. For example, last night I was on a plane going to rescue my partner from some danger. As I was having a conversation with someone across the aisle, everything went blurry, there was a cacophony of noise, I couldn't breath, and I felt removed from my body. The exact same way I felt right before I lost consciousness in the crash. A few nights before, it happened while I was having the standard “you never graduated high school so you have to go back to get your diploma” dream. A couple weeks back, it happened in the backseat of the Jeep Cherokee I lived in for a period of time when I was 9 years old. It’s always far too vivid.

Maybe this post is a bit too melodramatic (I planned on all this being funnier) but I’m just so worn down. I’m tired of waking up screaming and out of breath. I can handle the physical pain and discomfort but I wasn’t expecting to handle an additional mental load like this. I wasn’t prepared to introduce more PTSD into my system—it’s not playing well with the other comorbidities. I got robbed of the fun summer I was planning on having and may not be 100% until winter. I’m hoping to be recovered and willing to leave my house without panicking by my birthday in January. I’m tired of thinking about it and going to doctor’s appointments about it and therapy about it now too. I hate therapy. I’m getting more use out of venting here than I got in my first session. I should blog more… I got plenty of free time here in bed.

I’ve mostly been doing nothing at all, or as near to it as possible on doctor visit days. I’ve tried to work on my 10th Annual Summer Single but it’s been hard to focus with the post-concussion stuff and also everything else. Stay tuned about that later in the month, though. It really could be worse the more I think about it. A lot of people have reached out to help me and friends have been there to talk, even at my lowest points. My girlfriend has been an absolute saint as she deals with this on top of spreading her mother’s ashes at sea this past week. She is incredibly strong and I don’t know how she does it. Everyone at the ER was super nice and I was well taken care of. The doctors I’ve had since are… trying their best, I’m sure. I have a lot of pain and some days are really difficult but I have more gratitude than anything else. And I’m ready to do more with my life now that I almost lost it. I’m ready now, oh my god, I need to get out of bed.

I hope everyone who reads this smashes a car into a million tiny pieces with a big rubber mallet. For me <3

Nicky Flowers - 08/07/24 - check out my EP, any money i receive from sales will be going to treats