reesesWeb

I held off on writing about this, because, frankly, I had been waiting to see if I could get photos. This kind of story just screams for them. And, given the personal import, the volume on everything else is so low as a result that nothing else really matters enough to bother typing.

At slightly after midnight EDT Friday morning, my phone rang. Every time my phone rings, it surprises me. I never check my voice mail, because I have structured my life such that perhaps four or five people actually get in touch with me by phone. I hate phones, because I'm a creature of secondary communication, and I can't get any of the feedback that I require when speaking to someone, if I can't see their faces. It's so disconnected that it feels like I'm shouting down the well at them. Those of you who have participated in conference calls know exactly what I'm talking about -- I'm like a caricature from the '30s, some luddite perched over the phone, shouting into it as if it's necessary to increase the volume to be heard all the way on the other side of the world, that my voice won't make it to Germany or Amsterdam if I don't give it a little boost.

So, when the phone rang at midnight, not only was I surprised, I was tempted not to answer it, thinking it was one of the numerous wrong numbers I get. As Washington, DC, is an international city with a significant population of foreign nations who, presumably, would speak to people in foreign countries with more frequency than people in the general population of, say, Seattle, they're making a lot more calls after nine or ten PM than decency would suggest, and they seem to dial a lot of wrong numbers at this hour, too. The benefit of caller id is such that, in this circumstance, I was able to see that this was probably a call I didn't want to miss, coming from my parents' house in Washington State. Even more strangely, my sister was calling, which has happened perhaps three times since I left home a hundred years ago. Usually, my mom calls, and if my sister's around, I'll talk to her later. She never actually originates the call.

"First of all, you need to know he's fine." Of course, no good conversation starts this way. "Dad was in an accident, and mom is driving him to the hospital to have his hand rebuilt. He'll probably lose part of his ring finger, but he's otherwise fine and coherent."

It turns out that my father was driving his work vehicle, a monstrous Expedition, home on a state highway. Two lanes, undivided, 55mph speed limit, winds around a lot of blind corners, goes through semi-residential areas, lots of access roads, etc.

My dad came around one of these blind corners to see a car stopped in the process of turning left, making a u-turn, whatever. Right around a blind corner, with no oncoming traffic. He couldn't honk and go to the left, in case she continued forward and he plowed into her, and he obviously couldn't hit her straight on. He hit the brakes, calculated that his rate of deceleration was not sufficient to clear the car, and steered onto the shoulder to the right. The gravel on the soft shoulder caught the right front wheel and started pulling him very hard to the right, so once past the stopped car, he pulled it back to the left. When the tire caught on the asphalt, his car was sufficiently turned against the direction of momentum that his car rolled.

Unfortunately, his side window was down, it being about 900 degrees, and he couldn't keep his left hand in the car. The hand was thrown outside the window, where it was beaten between the ground and car before the car stopped rolling. My dad, ever the clear thinker, looked down through his side window, and saw something you don't really want to see out the side window of your car, right past a blind corner on a highway: the yellow line. (In the US, this divides lanes of opposite directions of travel) He managed to unbuckle his safety belt with his functioning hand, and dragged himself out of the truck limped to the side of the road to await the emergency response staff, who happened to include a kid I played hockey with, and a couple kids my dad had umpired in little league. Pictures were taken, and he was carted off to the emergency room.

To give an idea how bad his hand was, the trauma nurse said that it was the worst hand injury she had ever seen. This, in a farming community of thresher and combine accidents, rattlesnake bites, and general small-town drunken foolishness. The staff surgeon looked at the hand and declared that he was unqualified to work on it. Having a history of hand injury, my father instructed them to call his hand surgeon at a hospital fifty miles away, who prepped to receive my dad when he arrived.

Now, I'm going to interrupt the narrative here to explain something about my dad. In fact, about both of my parents. They're incredibly tough people. They come from hardy stock who put up with an incredible array of hardships just to stay alive and get out in the middle of nowhere. I have an absurd level of admiration for the stuff they get through, and while I have nowhere near their level of kantian determination, they have definitely given me excellent preparation in dealing with misfortune. If you're not dead, you can laugh about it, and you can take another run at it later.

So, I call my dad's cell phone, expecting to reach my mom. My dad answers it, exactly as he always answers the phone, stating his name. (Why is it that so many guys answering cell phones answer with their names? We seem to think that, if the phone can be anywhere when it rings, that the person on the other end of the phone doesn't really know which phone they'll get when they dial our number.) I'm a bit surprised, and think that perhaps it was all a dream, or a surreal and cruel joke, or an hallucination.

It turns out that (here we go about the toughness) my dad didn't really want to be strapped down in the back of an ambulance for the hour-long drive to Richland. So, he had them clean him up a minimal amount, (so no damage was done to what was left of his hand) give him a jolt of morphine, and my mother would drive him to the other hospital.

They make it there without incident (I didn't ask if his truck was still there when they passed the accident site) and he went into microsurgery for several hours, while his surgeon re-established as much blood flow as possible. This was an emergency surgery, and no bones were re-set, pinned or screwed together. The hand was cleaned and kept alive until the next surgery, scheduled for Sunday morning, where the three broken fingers will be pinned and screwed back on, and any other bones will be encouraged to migrate back to their original positions.

A third surgery, which may or may not be needed, will involve a skin graft to replace lost tissue. Of course, the joke about this is that he's been making deposits in the skin bank for the past ten years, as he's gone from about 150lb to 190lb, and he's about to make a withdrawal and reap the dividends.

Some people claim that I'm a pessimist, but I'm mostly just sarcastic. (And whiny, of course.) While the stream of garbage that comes out of my mouth and fingers is largely negative, I have a vastly optimistic view of the future. While this accident is hugely unfortunate, it actually strengthens my happy expectations for the coming years.

You see, as mentioned on many occasions before, I have this incredible fear of death. I don't really fear dying, and have done a lot of things that increased my chances of dying at any point, but I'm obviously not yet dead. If I am dead, either heaven is vastly overrated, or hell is really unimaginative in its torments. In addition to my death, I also have a monstrous fear of my parents dying. I know it's going to happen, and, as my father is 61, he's probably closer to the end than the beginning.

What reinforces my optimism is how bloody easily he has dealt with this accident. As I mentioned before, he's very tough. 61-year-old men don't just walk away from accidents that turn their hands into bone-studded pulp, after being put through the spin cycle. They definitely don't answer the cell phone and ask how the heck the other person is doing, while being driven to the hospital.

If he can do that, I figure he's got a long, long time to look forward to finding new ways to mangle his hands, his back, his stomach, his esophagus, his intestines, his nose, his neck, and G-d knows what else. In my selfish opinion, this is a very good thing for me.

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