Drunk Strippers And Other Road Hazards, Part 3 - PG13

I told you about the actual accident. Told you about the injuries. Now to the "other" stuff. After the Highway Patrol Officer informed me that the person who hit me was drunk, my parents insisted I get a lawyer. A good one. Enter Sam. My mom drove me to a big law firm that is on the back of all the phone books and I met with Lawyer Sam. The first time I met with Lawyer Sam it was very somber. "I'm very sorry for your pain, I'm sorry this happened to you. Blah, blah, blah." He said all the things you would expect him too. I signed releases for him to get the police report and my medical report. And then I told him that the person who hit me had been drunk. He immediately perked up. "Oh, really! Well, that changes everything!"

The next day I got a phone call from Sam. I was injured and hurt, but I've never heard such pure joy in someones voice before.

Sam - "Guess what?"
Me - "What?"
Sam - "I know something you don't know..."
Me - "Again, what?"
Sam -"Well! It turns out she was drunk. Very drunk. Blood alcohol .26!"
Me - "This I know."
Sam - "But this part you don't know. She got drunk where she worked."
Me - "Who gets drunk at work? Where did she work?"
Sam - "The Blankety Blank Blank (bar name hidden for legal reasons)."
Me - "Was she a waitress? Bar tender?"
Here is where Sam sounds really giddy.
Sam - "Nope. She was a stripper! Apparently she got tanked before she went on stage to perform and then she drove herself home. You know the rest."
Me - "So what does this mean?"
Sam is practically laughing.
Sam - "It means the bar is liable. It means that she got drunk as an employee and anything she did while being their employee they are responsible for. Especially if they knew she was drunk when she left."

This information changed everything because now we were dealing with cooperate insurance. Sam realized how big this case was going to be and got another lawyer (his best friend by the way) to help with the case. Enter Lawyer Darren.

I have never really had much interaction with the field of law. The prosecution, the trying of cases. I don't even watch Law and Order on TV. But what I figured out about injury law, it is a three-ring circus.

First, Lawyer Darren didn't even try to act sad that I was hurt. He just kept saying how great this whole case was turning out to be. I couldn't have asked for a better set of facts. Second, the ENTIRE division of law in greater Salt Lake was run by a bunch of potty mouths.The following is an actually conversation that I heard over the speaker phone with the District Attorney of Salt Lake and my lawyer.

D.A. - "So we got a real f***in' ball buster on our hands here, huh?"
Lawyer - "Oh yeah. That bar, they are going to pay f***in' big time. And it was a f***in' stripper! It doesn't get better than that!"
D.A. - "So tell me about your client. Please tell me she's a crack whore. Please. If a stripper hits a crack whore nobody cares. This will all go away."
Lawyer - "Nope. She's actually a 29 year old cute, blonde, stay-at-home mom with three kids who happened to be in the car with her."
D.A. - "Sh**."
Lawyer - "Guess where her husband was at the time? Serving our country in the Middle East. That is going to sound great on the stand."
D.A. - "Double sh**."

It was a little surreal to know that all these people knew about my life. The D.A. knew my name, had a file on his desk about me. Then when the case about the bar came up, their lawyers really did some digging on me. When I went for the deposition, they asked me everything from where I went to elementary school to what kind of car I had when I was 18. They knew EVERYTHING about me, I saw the file. They only asked me things to see if they could catch me in a lie about things in my past. Of course, living all my life in suburban Utah I didn't really have much of a past for them to dig up. They were looking for something I had done so that it didn't look so glaringly horrible that this woman crashed into me.

And that woman. I only saw her a few times at her criminal hearing. When Lawyer Sam and I went to the first one we were both really anxious to see what she looked like. When she stood up to have the charges read against her, Lawyer Sam said and I quote - "Looks like bars are picking out their strippers at the local K-Mart." I burst out laughing in the court room. The judge told me to keep it down or they would have to remove me. Oops.

Another thing about Lawyer Sam and Lawyer Darren. They quoted movies all the time. Especially Raising Arizona. Having worked at a video store, I was quite familiar with this movie. They would call me and tell me to come down to the office to sign a document and I would end up staying there for three hours hanging out and quoting this movie. "Daddy, daddy, Mr. McDunough wet himself!" 

The civil trial (the trial for monetary damages) never went to court. We went right up to the day before the trial when the bar countered with an offer we just couldn't refuse. And thus, my professional relationship with Lawyer Sam and Lawyer Darren was over. Now we're just friends. These two men were a big part of my life for almost three years and I'm lucky to now count them as such. I have even referred several cases their way. They were funny and some of my best friends when I felt lost and alone. We still talk every couple of months. And they still have potty mouths.

Dr. Greg was the man who physically put me back together. And he was a great guy too. Every appointment I had to go and see him he told me the same joke.
"There was this lady who was watching the news and she saw that they were doing a special report that someone was driving down the freeway the wrong way. She realized that this was the way that her husband took to work so she frantically called him on his cell phone. Honey, honey! Watch out! Someone is going the wrong way on the freeway you are on! The husband answers, Babe, there isn't just one, they're all going the wrong way!!" I heard this every appointment and he always told it the same way, like I had never heard it before and that it was the funniest thing he had ever said. This doctor was like none I had ever had. He hugged me every time. He gave me his personal cell phone number to call him if I couldn't get through his receptionist. He had his wife bring in lunch as a surprise to one of my appointments and the three of us sat and talked. As bad as my foot got, I had complete faith he would be able fix me. And fix me he did.

Another group of people who played a major part in this were my physical therapists. They were Damon and someone I will call S. I'll only call him S because he started to get a little "friendly" with me and it made me a more than uncomfortable. So friendly that he said he would leave his wife for me if I left my husband. What?!?!? Let's just say that after I told the director of the physical therapy office about that, S didn't treat me anymore. I was left to the capable hands of Damon. Damon really became a good friend during that time. I spent two hours a day, three times a week with him for a year and a half. We got to be pretty good friends. We talked about our kids and our spouses and told jokes. If a treatment had been especially painful or difficult he would call me later in the day to see how I was doing. When he handed me my diploma and my T-shirt at the very last appointment, we hugged and we both had tears in our eyes. He had been a witness to one of the worst times of my life and he was a constant source of reassurance that everything would be okay. We recently just saw each other at another medical office and we sat and talked for two hours. It was like old times.

Those are the people who healed me. I met them all through this challenging ordeal. At first meeting, they were just part of the background, part of the circumstances of the accident. But as time went on, they all became friends. I don't know if it was because I gave off this feeling of needing something or because Matt was gone for a lot of the aftermath of the accident, but they were all very protective of me. They were kind. And above all, they were funny. They added humor to a situation that I felt was drowning me. About a year after the surgery (almost four years after the accident), I went and saw all of them in person and thanked them for what they did for me. I thanked them for being them.

So there you have it. That is the story of the infamous accident. There are some things that I didn't really talk about. Like how Channel 2 news came and interviewed me two days after the accident and it was on TV. Like how the National Guard made a video about the accident and how important it is to wear your seat belt. Like how the drunk driver at first was charged with a felony and then begged my lawyer to plea bargain it down to a misdemeanor and in exchange she would testify against the bar at the civil trial. She ended up not doing that. She said, and under oath I might add, that she never said she would do any such thing. Funny, you would think that strippers who drive drunk the wrong way on the freeway would have a higher sense of morals.

THE END

 

Drunk Strippers And Other Road Hazards, Part 2

So where were we? Oh yeah, car accident, sprained ankle, Matt deployed.

One of the first things I did was contact the American Red Cross. They are the ones responsible for locating and sending home deployed soldiers when there is an emergency at home. We had been apart for 10 months at this point, the longest time we've ever spent apart. My mom went and picked him up at the airport because I no longer had a car. When he walked through the door our son Aidan, who was barely two at the time, was scared to death of him. Alexander and Ashlenne remembered him, but Aidan wouldn't go near him for three days.
After watching Alexander and Ashlenne climb all over Matt, he cautiously approached him. It took almost a full week before he would run to him or call out for him.

During this time my "sprained ankle" is getting worse, and something is obviously wrong with my foot. It just hangs there. I am unable to flex it up towards my shin. My big toe won't move either, and it is hurting more and more. I went to see my doctor, Dr. Sue. She took one look at my foot and ankle and sent me to a specialist, Dr. Greg. Dr. Greg x-rayed me right away. Yes, my ankle was severely sprained, but it was also severely broken. I also I had multiple fractures in my foot. I had been walking around on this mess for two weeks. Enter the walking boot. The walking boot was a big part of my life for the next five months. It was awesome.

Also around the time my lower extremity injuries are making themselves known, a nasty neck injury also presented itself. I had compressed all the vertebrae on the right side of my neck. Enter physical therapy. I went to physical therapy three times a week for over a year. I was hung by my head in a traction device to try and get those vertebrae to realign themselves. I had a headache for about four months. Again, awesome.

Matt only had two weeks of emergency leave at home. During this time he deals with the insurance and buys a new car. Shortly after Thanksgiving we take him to the airport and watch him walk away and get on a plane back to Qatar. A fog thick and dark as a black, inky night settled on me. I thought I had known depression before, but baby, I was wrong. This was depression. I slept around 13 hours a day. It's hard to describe, but I literally had to force myself to push air in and out of my lungs. The effort was enormous. Any light I had in my life went out. Now the accident wasn't the only thing going on in my life at this moment, but with the injuries and Matt leaving and some personal family issues, a perfect storm was created that spun me down so low I didn't think I would crawl back out. And I didn't want too. I was hopeless. No matter how much pain medication I took my leg hurt. Unknown to me or the doctor, there was damage spread all the way up to my knee. One night after the kids were in bed I stood at the medicine cabinet and thought. I looked at the pills. And I looked some more. Thoughts that I don't talk about very often filled my head. I just don't want to be in pain anymore.  And those pills offered a way out. The next day I went in for an emergency appointment with Dr. Sue. Her husband was also deployed at the time. And when I told her what I had thought the night before she held me and we cried together. It took a full two years, therapy and some very strong selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (anti-depressants) to climb out of that hole.

Matt came home in March 2004. I was still hobbling around on a broken foot and ankle. They hadn't healed at all. I would go in for new x-rays every three weeks and there was never any new bone growth. Matt's little sister was married in June. I was on my foot for a lot of the night. The next morning I woke up and my foot was the size of a football. Matt took me up to Dr. Greg and he x-rayed it. Not only was it still severely broken, it was broken more than right after the accident. Enter walking boot number two. The doctors are really starting to worry. I go in for tests on my bone density. I go in for a full body scan. Blood work, nerve tests. It was never ending. Why won't this foot heal?

It turns out the magic bullet was getting pregnant and having all those wonderful hormones circulating through my blood causing all that bone to grow back together. Thanks Andre! It could also be that the 7 1/2 months I was pregnant with Andre (he was early), I was so sick I didn't get off the couch at all.

Fast forward to September 2005. The x-rays show the bones have finally healed. But I am still in considerable pain. A MRI shows that scar tissue tumors have grown along the nerves in my foot where it was broken. They are called neuromas. There are two ways to treat neuromas. Cut them out or inject 100 percent alcohol into the nerve hoping to dissolve the fatty covering of the nerve so it can't fire anymore. Sclerosing the nerve is what Dr. Greg called it. Enter six weeks of living hell. You know how much alcohol stings when it's poured on an open cut? Imagine 10cc's of it being injected into an area of your body that is already in pain. Twice a week for six weeks. I had bruises the sizes of oranges. After the twelth injection Dr. Greg says this obviously isn't working. It's time for surgery. In addition to the neuromas, a MRI showed that my tendons and ligaments had been torn in my ankle and that's why it still hurt.

January 29, 2006. Dr. Greg puts me out and goes about cutting nerves and scar tissue out of my foot and reconstructing my ankle by literally cutting and pasting my tendons and securing them to the ankle bone with some very long screws. I have five weeks of no weight on my foot. When I'm finally able to put weight on it again I go back to my new best friend, Damon, at physical therapy. Four months later I graduate. They actually give me a diploma and a T-shirt. I walk out of there feeling better than I have in almost two and half years.

Where does all of this leave me now? I was disabled from all of this. I permanently lost 25 percent of my muscle mass in my calf. I lost feeling feeling in about a third of my foot from the nerves being cut out. And that nasty neck injury never really resolved itself. Scar tissue had grown in between the vertebrae. I can no longer turn my head to right very far. And some days, for no apparent reason, my foot and ankle will throb with a vengeance.

But I'm alive. And if you can believe it my kids got away without a scratch on them. They walked away from this whole mess completely unscathed.

Part 3 next!

Drunk Strippers And Other Road Hazards, Part 1

Last Wednesday marked the seventh anniversary of the car accident my children and I were in.
This event is to huge to be just one post, so stay tuned for parts 2 & 3.

On November 11, 2003 at 7:05 pm I was travelling north on I-215 west in the far left lane, or the 'fast lane'. I had all three of my small children in the back seat of my 1997 GMC Yukon. Alexander was 5, Ashlenne was 3, and Aidan was barely 2. I was just getting ready to change lanes as my exit was a mile away when I looked up and through the windshield of the car in front of me, I saw headlights. Now the events I will describe next happened in literally two seconds. The car in front of me swerved so hard to the right it almost rolled over. I began to try and get out of the way, but there wasn't enough time. I was travelling 65 miles an hour and the person who struck me was travelling 60 miles per hour. So for those of you out there who can't add that is a combined impact speed of 125 miles per hour. 

When we struck each other, our driver's side headlights matched up perfectly. It wasn't a head-on collision, but pretty close. The impact immediately deployed my airbags. My side window shattered and glass sprayed throughout the cabin of the car. If you have been in an accident where the air bags have deployed, you know how much smoke comes out with them. And honestly, one of the first things I thought was how beautiful it all was. The headlights of all the cars made the glass flying through the air light up like twinkling stars and the smoke made it all seem so ethereal. As soon as the impact occurred time slowed down to a crawl. It was almost like watching a movie in slow motion. I didn't feel connected to the events that were happening.

When we collided I actually drove up and over her car. She was driving a small 4-door sedan. The impact also pushed me into the other lanes of traffic where there were what? Yep, more cars. We were immediately hit again on the back fender, drivers side. This impact forced my car to spin around 450 degrees. That is a total of one and 1/4 times around. The force of the spin actually ripped the tires off of the car.

The force of the collision ripped the door off it's hinges so it was hanging open. When we were struck the second time and spun around I could feel the centrifugal force pulling me out of the car. The only thing that kept me in that car was a thin piece of material, my seat belt. When they towed it they had to tie the door to the car to keep it from flopping open.

After all that spinning, we finally came to rest on the right hand shoulder of the freeway. We had spun across all four lanes of traffic. I can't remember if my children made any sound during the actual accident, but I know they sure started screaming when we came to a stop. I don't remember feeling any pain at that moment. All I could think about was getting my kids out of the smoking car. I shoved my door open wide enough to climb out and as soon as my feet hit the ground I collapsed. I wouldn't know it for awhile, but my left foot and ankle were broken. I staggered back up and began to try and pry open the back doors. At this time strangers who saw the accident came to my aid. The kids climbed out and I checked them over. One of the women who ran over was a registered nurse and she started helping us out. I never saw myself, but I must have looked quite the sight because I hit that airbag pretty hard and had a gusher of a bloody nose and my lips were split in about four places. If you look close enough you can actually see my makeup print from my face hitting the airbag.



My car and the car of the person who hit me ended up several hundred feet apart. As people started gathering around me and the kids sitting on the side of the freeway I asked them "Did you see that car going the wrong way?!" All of them said "No. All we saw were a bunch of sparks and you spinning around."

Nobody could remember seeing a car coming the other direction. The nurse was busy checking and re-checking the kids. They seemed perfect so far. Not a scratch on them. The EMT's worked their way over to me. The Highway Patrol shut down the freeway. They had to use the jaws of life to cut the person who hit me out of her car. Life Flight landed 25 feet from where I was sitting. I managed to get a hold of my mom on a cell phone and she made it to the accident sight right as they were putting me in an ambulance.

This is when the pain set in. The adrenaline was wearing off and I hurt. I hurt everywhere. I don't remember it, but when the airbag blew my hands of the steering wheel, it blew my left hand right into the window as it shattered and it was now peppered with cuts and pieces of teeny-tiny glass embedded in it. Yes, it is as painful as you think. In this ambulance is where my ankle REALLY starts hurting. When we get to the hospital a Highway Patrol Officer is the first person to inform me that yes, there was a car going the wrong way. I didn't imagine it. Oh, and something else. The woman driving the car had a blood alcohol level something to the tune of .26. That is over three times the legal limit. In the emergency room the doctors ask me "Where do you hurt?" I told them my ankle so they x-rayed it and came back and said that it wasn't broken. It's just a sprain so give it a couple of days to relax and then start walking on it again so it doesn't tighten up. Then they patted me on the back and sent me home.

We spent the night at my mom's so she could keep an eye on us. I think we were all in shock. This was during Matt's first deployment so he wasn't home. It's funny, but I don't remember much of that first night, but I can remember with absolute clarity the two hours before the car accident. I remember what I was wearing. I remember what I ate. I remember the songs we listened to all the way from our home to where the accident happened. Those hours are forever etched in my mind.

This one event affected my adult life more than anything else, save for getting married and having children. It was a defining moment for me and my family. Some has actually been good, some definitely not good. Stay tuned for Drunk Strippers And Other Road Hazards, Part 2.