I Do Not Recommend This Experience

I’ve been dark here for over a month. It’s been hard to get myself to finish writing this entry, but I’ve got to get through it to put it behind me and move on to other stuff.

In late October I flew back east to visit my parents, and my sister and nephew also drove up. We were all there to celebrate a milestone birthday for my mother. For a change, I had very little to do to manage her financial affair while I was there, so we were able to go out shopping and for some meals, all capped off by a family dinner at a nice restaurant on the evening of her birthday.

At the end of the weekend my sister and nephew left to drive home, and I took mom out to lunch. Then we decided to drive to another city to do some shopping and take a look at the colorful fall leaves on the trees, which I don’t often get to see.

And on our drive there we got into a serious traffic accident.

I’m not going to go into the details of the accident here, save to say that we collided with (I’m told) a Ford F-350 pickup truck. Given that, I think we’re lucky that we got out without broken bones or internal bleeding. I keep telling myself that it could have been much, much worse. My father’s car, nowhere near as big as a pickup truck, was totalled.

We spent the rest of that day in the emergency room getting checked out as both of us were sore. Then we took a cab back to return my mother to her apartment in her assisted living facility, and then I took a second cab back to my dad’s house, finally collapsing into bed close to midnight.

I was lucky to be able to find my iPhone immediately after the crash (it had been sitting in a cupholder giving directions), as it was essential to keeping my family up-to-date and to be able to make necessary calls while in the emergency room. I’m also pretty impressed that it came through the collision with only a small scratch to the case – no damage to the phone at all.

I had originally intended to fly home the next day, but instead I rescheduled my flight for the next weekend. The next few days were a whirlwind of talking to the insurance adjuster, renting a car, helping my father test and buy a new car, visiting my mother, filling out forms, and just generally being massively stressed out.

One bright spot of that week was going to dinner one night with my dad and a friend of his, whom I’m sure I’d met before, but probably twenty years or more ago. It was a nice, relaxing dinner with good conversation and good food, which was much better than getting dinner on my own while they went out together and being left to my own thoughts.

I had a couple of scrapes and nicks and some lower back soreness following the accident, but some extra-strength ibuprofen controlled the pain I felt from the very first dose, and I gradually weaned myself off of it over the next couple of weeks. Today, a month later, I’ve been pain free for a couple of weeks. My mother had a harder time bouncing back, although we eventually learned that she had some unrelated medical issues which were not being properly treated, so we may never know exactly what was happening.

I finally flew home on my rescheduled flight. In a classic “adding insult to injury” development, Debbi called me the day of my flight to tell me that our refrigerator had stopped working. Whee! For various reasons this took a lot longer to resolve than it should have, involving two different repair companies. But it is finally fixed, which makes us happy because it’s really exactly the refrigerator we want (other than that not-working problem). We can highly recommend Your Appliance Repair to any locals looking for similar service: Friendly people who explain what they’re doing.

Since then I have been extraordinarily busy at work, my sister and I have been doing a lot of stuff involving Mom’s health and affairs, and to top it all off I got sick last Monday, stayed home on Tuesday, felt better on Wednesday, and then felt a lot worse on Thursday, and it’s still lingering around today. Few things take the wind out of your sails like feeling like crap for the better part of a week.

So that’s been my month in a nutshell, including what is a contender for the worst week of my life in the wake of the accident. I’m sure there will be more to deal with in the future, but for now it feels like life is finally edging back towards normal.