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Kara Swanson, Rising Star Press (page 1 of 4) Page 1 of 4
Catching the Bus: Red Light Blues
The curious thing about the auto accident that ended my life was that I lived through it. On January 31, 1996, Death sneaked through a red light disguised as a minivan going 50 miles an hour. ’Course, nobody told me that when they finished pulling me out of my car, they were putting me right on the bus.
That’s what I call the process of recovering from traumatic brain injury: “getting on the bus.” It’s a good thing they strapped me down and fastened my head to a board. Had I understood even a little of the journey that had just begun, I would have hit the ground running! I have always held the utmost respect for brave souls who face death with class and grace; who, with their last earthly breath, cite poetic verse on the meaning of life or seek to calm nearby witnesses from the awkwardness of impending demise. Luckily, I had no witnesses nearby. I had probably a second to sum up life as I’d known it. In the moment I thought I was about to die (to my vast surprise), I faced it with these courageous words of wisdom: “I’m fucked!” So much for class and grace.
I got pasted. To this day I have lost the morning of and the two days prior to my accident. I may have lost the third day also: wasn’t that the day Publisher’s Clearing House was supposed to show up at my front door after the Super Bowl? The sound of the crash of thousands of pounds of fusing metal was, I thought, unspectacular. Maybe I’ve watched too many movies. My first thought was how to get out of the car with the driver’s side door lying in my lap. They say the mind protects us from dealing with events too traumatic to process immediately. For whatever reason, I was a bit oblivious, entertaining myself with thoughts peculiar to the moment. I was happy I had just showered and shaved my legs. My mother’s line (everybody’s mother’s line), “Always wear clean underwear in case you get into a car accident!” struck me as particularly funny. I was relieved my dogs weren’t with me. I giggled at the thought that I had wanted to get the chip in my windshield fixed; the windshield now lay shattered all around me. I asked a woman at the scene to pass her cellular phone through what used to be my window so I could call my brother and tell him what had happened.
Perhaps I should have realized something was wrong when I didn’t care that three young, handsome medics were cutting off my clothes and probing my naked body (I didn’t even suck in my stomach!). Maybe I should have guessed that my brain had been squished when I could not think of where my brother worked or what his phone number was. Or when I allowed the woman from the emergency room to slide a bedpan under modest me without a second thought.
Seven or eight hours later, they released me with a gruesome headache, a new pair of scrub pants, ill-fitting crutches, and vivid colors on my body. I also left with the feeling that I was damned lucky. Blessed, if you will. Like I had walked right up to Death and tweaked him on the nose.
Witnesses at the scene called it a miracle that I survived. The police told me that if I hadn’t been wearing my seat belt, the witnesses would have been treated to the sight of Kara flying out the passenger side window. Even as they pulled crumpled glass from some pretty incredible places on my body, there were no cuts and no broken bones, only doctors left shaking their heads in disbelief.
We celebrated my survival that night with pizza and painkillers (a favorite combination still). I told my bosses, who had stayed with me at the hospital and taken me home, that I would be back to work in a week, tops.
I wrote this book because the understanding of traumatic brain injury is very limited outside the medical community that specializes in it — much less among average “civilians.” I left that hospital without a clue as to what a head injury was or what that diagnosis would soon imply. Every year, thousands of people join me and unknowingly bid farewell to the lives they had known. Whether the diagnosis is termed “traumatic brain injury,” “closed head injury” or “severe concussion,” many survivors are learning the tough lesson I learned: sometimes when your life ends, you don’t actually die.
My doctor and my psychotherapist encouraged me to write this book. Not because my story is remarkable. Not because it’s a tale of cosmic proportions. On the contrary, my story is unfortunately all too common. I wrote it because there are new faces on the bus every day. Faces of people who realize something is wrong with them, something they cannot yet understand. Faces that have no idea how lengthy and difficult the process of recovery is going to be. I wanted to write the book that I wish I could have read when I was first diagnosed with a brain injury.
Whether I have accomplished that or not, I honestly don’t know. One of the residual problems from my injury is that I am largely incapable of tracking a story for long. This might be the first book ever written that the author hasn’t really read.
I have attempted to address some of the potholes and barricades that I came upon—and often tripped over or fell into. I kept a journal, first to counter my short-term memory loss, then as a marker of progress and a sounding board for frustration and hope.
This is for everyone on the bus. It’s about our hard-fought battle. It’s for every survivor who fights that battle every day with courage and strength, frustration and wit, grief and confusion, begrudging acceptance and hopeful determination. It’s for families who seek answers to questions they don’t even know yet to ask. It’s for friends and coworkers of survivors who find strangers hidden behind familiar faces.
It’s also for the thousands of people committed to the prevention and treatment of brain injury. These medical communities, mental health practitioners and legal professionals offer care, protection and hope for survivors and their families. They provide counseling and legal guidance, and bring desperately needed resources to survivors who find themselves lost in a recovery they are often ill-equipped or ill-prepared to take on. Part of the proceeds from this book will help some of these people afford the tools they need to help rebuild lives that have been rocked to their foundation by the devastation of head trauma.
From I'll Carry the Fork by Kara L. Swanson, published by Rising Star Press. Copyright ©1999 and 2003 by Kara L. Swanson. Used with permission. www.risingstarpress.com. To read author Kara Swanson's blog, go to karaswanson.wordpress.com.
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