Waking up in an Alternate Reality

This wasn’t the life I had dreamed of.

I woke up in the hospital, in the Neurological Intensive Care Unit.

I didn’t understand how or why I was in the hospital.

“You were in a car accident,” I was told.

That didn’t make sense to me. How could I be in a car accident that I don’t remember?

I did remember going to work on Monday.

“You didn’t go to work,” my mom said. “You were in a car accident late Sunday night. They flew you in the LifeFlight helicopter from the scene of the accident to the hospital early Monday morning. Today is Thursday.”

On Friday, I was moved from the Neurological Intensive Care Unit to the Orthopaedic floor.

I don’t understand. How can this be real? I don’t remember a car accident. How can a car accident have happened if I don’t remember it?

“Mom, I don’t understand. Everybody keeps saying I was in a car accident. Tell me why am I really in the hospital?”

My mom handed me a copy of the police report of the accident. Here was hard, cold evidence that I had indeed been in a car accident. A car accident that I had no memory of.

A drunk driver had crashed into my car head-on. Both cars were totalled.

My injuries were extensive: the tendons in my right ankle were sliced, my right hip was fractured and dislocated, my left femur was broken, my mouth hit the steering wheel which knocked loose 4 teeth on the bottom, knocked 1 tooth on the bottom out entirely, and broke off my 2 front teeth on the top, and I had a double concussion. Both the front and back of my brain were bruised by the whiplash effect of the head-on collision and then the release when the forward motion stopped.

I was in the hospital for 3 weeks and home bedbound for another 3 weeks as my bones and tendons healed. Physical therapy began and went on for 10 weeks.

I kept the accident report next to my bed and read it over and over again. How could this be real?

It would be many more months before I accepted this new, alternate reality as real.