Super Smash Brothers: Teenagers, Cars, Shattered Glass, and an Ambulance.

Admittedly over the past few weeks I have been struggling to find good blog worthy material to write about… and by “blog worthy” this is something akin to the Jerry Springer guest screening process.  Still I like to write about something interesting in my life, yet the topics I want to write about were either stories that were not yet ripe for telling or as my life has been relatively drama free of late, not too interesting to write about (imagining the sound of deep horns in three descending notes)… “Dad, I just got T-boned.”   ***sigh***   Drama and interest just found me.

I had just dropped off my daughter Olivia at an end of season basketball team pizza party and met up with my girlfriend and fellow child chauffer, Julie, who had just dropped off her kids at dance class a few blocks away from the pizza place.  Settling into a rare oasis of a mutual kid-free hour, my phone unsurprisingly rang. I saw it was Patrick, my oldest son.  I had asked him to take his brother to a drivers-ed safety course at this time (now this Alanis is ironic… don’t you think?) and I just figured he couldn’t find his brother, Locke.  Answering the phone the voice on the other end was calm, frustrated and down, yet calm and collected.  “Dad, I just got T-boned.”  With the lack of panic in his voice I jumped right into irritated parent mode. My son having previously totaled his first junker less than seven months ago in a fender bender and only having liability on this current junker, I was beginning to wonder if my son was equating “junker” with “disposable.”  With this thought in mind, my first question was “was it your fault?”  Telling me he wasn’t sure in what sounded to be a downtrodden voice, I realized that I had just failed the “good parent” test, I had assumed by his calm voice that he and his brother were fine, but I hadn’t actually asked.

Trying to recapture my good parent street cred, I quickly asked Patrick if Locke was hurt.  He said Locke was okay.  Lastly, figuring I already knew the answer, but just covering my bases, I asked Patrick if he was okay.  “No, I am kind of hurt.” This made sense, it never feels good to get hit by a car. But still, he was talking calmly and seemed to be doing well enough.  Hurt or not hurt, either way I needed to be there.  He told me that he was just around the corner from my house.  So Julie and I each jumped into our vehicles and headed off to the accident site five minutes away. Now falling back into bad parenting mode I will admit as I was driving all I could think was “Stupid kid, I can’t afford to buy him a third car.”  I hoped that whatever dents there might be in the car, it might still be drivable to save the expense.  I looked at the clock and wondered if I would have enough time to get my other son to his driver’s ed safety course and I fretted about what would become of my insurance premiums and which kidney I would need to part ways with to pay for them.

As I turned north onto Highway 89 where the accident occurred, right between the two traffic lights in my town, I shuttered.  There were enough first responder flashing lights up ahead to escort OJ Simpson on a low-speed chase. At that moment, my trifling thoughts stopped dead in their tracks.  As I arrived at the scene and parked my truck at an assisted-living center, I saw multiple ambulances and multiple police cars and multiple fire trucks and amid all the flashing were two smashed cars crumbled together with debris scattered all over. This was a major accident and my boys were in the middle of it.

I ran across the dark street illuminated by the lights of the emergency vehicles and I could see both of my sons still in the car being attended to by EMTs.  They didn’t look good.  My heart sank into my stomach. I arrived first at the passenger door were Locke was leaning back in his seat being attended to. The airbags had deployed. His face was fissured with cuts and blood trickling out of them and despite the warm evening, his hands and legs were shaking uncontrollably. I grabbed his hand and asked how he was. Through a stiff jaw and quivering limbs he answered in a remarkably steady voice that he was okay. He sure didn’t look okay, but that was his story and he was sticking to it.

I next went to Patrick who was now standing outside of the car which was smashed in nearly a foot just behind the driver seat. Patrick was standing there quite somber with his shirt off checking a swollen welt on his left shoulder and cuts all over the opposite side of his face from Locke. Despite the mayhem, he was calm and related as best as he could what happened. He said that after the car stops spinning he first checked on Locke who reported that he was okay, though I’m beginning to think if Locke was missing a limb he would give a similar report. Patrick then had to force his door open, as it was jammed shut, and hurried over to check on the young lady who was driving the other car. The front of her car was smashed in at her door was also jammed and she said she couldn’t get out. Drawing on his Marine Corps strength training, Patrick pried her door open too and after she reporting that she had no major injuries, Patrick called me and sat back in his car seat as the adrenaline began to wane.

By this point the reality of my two boys sitting there in the middle of the street cut up, bloodied, and injured began to set in. As much as you never think that those freak events in life that permanently injure or take away a member your family could ever happen, that reality struck me at that moment. It was that moment when my eyes began to tear up that Julie arrived on the scene. Her face must have mirrored what mine look like at first arriving on the scene; a look of shocked bewilderment and fear.  She heard the original call from Patrick with his calm demeanor and none of that matched what was before her.  Hurrying across the street we embraced and I gave her a rundown of what I knew.

At this point I heard a familiar voice from one of the firemen. It was Norm from my High Priest group at church; a voice which I normally associate with inquiring as to whether I did my home teaching that month or not. We spoke for a moment then he went back to attending to the kids in the cars. Julie put herself to work grabbing the boys’ schoolbooks and personal belongings out of the car which obviously would never drive again. I took turns running from side to side checking on the boys and inquiring as to how the other driver was doing.  They asked Patrick if he felt he needed to ride in the ambulance or to go to the hospital in a private vehicle. He opted for the private vehicle. Locke and the other hand didn’t have a choice. They had brought a backboard to his side of the car and slid it underneath his still shaking frame.

Locke was the epitome of calm, but the pinstriped nature of one side of his face was still not too reassuring. I grabbed one of the sides of the backboard we lifted Locke out of the car and onto a gurney. They had a neck brace on him and he would be transported in an ambulance. Loading Locke into the ambulance I asked if I could have a minute with him and gave him a blessing. Kissing him on the head, I stepped out and let Patrick step in to ride with Locke since he was going to the hospital anyway.

I told the EMT which of the two nearby hospitals that I wanted them to go to and they sped off. Julie and I finished getting the boys belongings and watched the other driver loaded into her own ambulance.  Offering my thanks to the emergency responders, I jumped into my truck and headed south towards the hospital in Payson. I had texted and called Patrick’s mother, but hadn’t heard back from her yet. I’d also told my parents to get my boys into the “pray for me” text string my family always had going.

Running into the emergency room, I finally found the right door and passed through reception.  I told the first person I came across that my sons had just arrived. Not hearing the plural version of “son,” he asked which one was my son. The answer that they were both my sons was hard to get out. Being boys and coming from a rather accident-prone history myself, having one person in physical peril is not all that uncommon for an active boy. But having 2/3 of your boys in emergency room at the same time is a reality slap that I’d prefer to avoid in the future.

Both boys were resting in different rooms and being checked over by hospital staff with IVs in their arms. The doctor told me that each boy would need to receive a CT scan before they can report on anything definitive of the injuries.  Julie, who only lives a few miles from that hospital, soon arrived and my parents messaged me that they would be there in 30 minutes. Jules and I took turns bouncing from room to room with the boys and Julie kept the boys supplied with warm blankets from the blanket warmer. Locke was still on a backboard, with a neck brace, and in a fair amount of pain.  Each boy was taken back one at a time for nearly 30 minutes of CT scanning.

My parents arrived in the middle of the CT scans and we piled in the room of the boy who was not sticking his head inside a giant CT magnet at that moment. Once the boys were both done, Patrick felt good enough that he took himself into Locke’s room and sat by his side. Locke’s morphine was now kicking in and the mood of the evening finally began to lighten a bit. The boys laughed and we tease Locke about the doctors accidentally amputating things they weren’t supposed to. Locke had to suffer the indignity of that strange hospital tradition of making you pee into a container that seems entirely ill-suited for the task in a form of public urination that is generally discouraged by one’s parents - but I guess there was a curtain there to give an infinitesimal degree of privacy.

While waiting for the doctors to analyze the CT scan results, the boys’ mother had finally seen my message and called to say she was headed down. So in the midst of my two boys being in emergency room, one still strapped to a backboard, I would get to have my ex-wife, my parents (who really hadn’t seen my ex-wife since the divorce) and my girlfriend (who my ex-wife knew nothing about) all stuffed in the same emergency room at the same time.  It was at this point that I asked for my own morphine drip.

Just prior to their mother arriving, the doctor came into Locke’s room and gave us the good news.  All CT scans came out clear and they could unstrap him from the backboard, take out the IV, take off the neck brace, and let him use a real bathroom. He was mostly happy about the latter freedom. Shortly thereafter, their mother arrived and embraced the two boys as Patrick sat by Locke’s bedside. The room was large enough that we could sit on opposite sides and somewhat pretend the other party wasn’t there to attend the boys. Yet in true hospital efficiency, after giving Locke the all clear and disconnecting and decoupling him from all instrumentation and apparatuses, they kicked us out of his larger room and made us all cram into Patrick’s much smaller room. And not only did Locke get evicted from his larger room, they had poor Locke, who been strapped to a board for the better part of three hours, walk himself barefoot down the hallway to Patrick’s room.

Patrick being in a slightly less injured condition let Locke take his bed and Patrick sat in a chair by his brother.  Being in a smaller room where everyone was too close to not somewhat engage one another, Patrick tried to break the ice. Speaking to his mother and nodding over towards my girlfriend, Patrick said “I figured I’d get into this accident so you two could meet.”  The awkward silence unsurprisingly persisted.  At this point I was thinking that Patrick should give up his self-assigned role of parental mediator and stick with things he was better at… like driving.  After his mom made no response to the comment, Julie to her credit introduced herself directly.  Still the Jets and the Sharks found no parley.  Fortunately, the moment was shortly dispelled as a doctor came in and gave Patrick a clean bill of health too.  The stress deflated as we finally knew that the boys would recover just fine.

We gather up their belongings and watched our two boys give their best walking dead cast member impressions as they lumbered down the hallway toward the car. The boys sat down in the lobby as Julie offered to bring the truck around for them. Seeing those two sitting there, though battered and bruised, sitting there in one piece laughing at each other greatly put life into perspective. Life is a series of highs and lows; of plot twists and doldrums, of dismemberments and flesh wounds.  And all too many times the whirling of life is out of our control and all you can do is hold on to loved ones and pray, but on those occasions where you are able to walk away with your arms around your boys with nothing more than scars and stories to remember that day by, you count the tender mercies of life and pray for many more days together in the future.