Member-only story
Making Good from Bad
How I overcame a life-changing situation for the better.
Hard to believe that it has been nearly 20 years now. It was November 30, 1999, and I had to mail out my bills. I decided since it was a lovely sunny day, to walk rather than drive the quarter-mile.
I frankly don’t even remember this. But I am pretty sure that’s what I was thinking.
During the trip, in the process of crossing the busy highway between my apartment and the post office, I was struck by a car. I have zero memory of this, or frankly, most of the following week while heavily sedated.
This was, I’m sorry to report, a hit-and-run. The accident caused the shattering of my right clavicle (collar bone), my right tibia (the big bone between the knee and ankle), a fracture of the orbital around my left eye, and two breaks in the right fibula (the small bone between the ankle and knee).
My shattered clavicle caused stretching of the brachial-plexus (that’s the nerve bundle for the arm).
End result was a severely broken right leg and a largely unusable right arm.
It could have been worse
I have a pretty good guess as to what happened. They told me that the two cars immediately after the one who hit me drove on, but the…
