September 15, 1983
By: Brian M Winningham
Tags: Healing, Trauma, Pain, Stories

Mom said she was intent on getting home to make dad dinner, so she would drive since I was too scared. It had stopped raining enough that we were able to get out of the car and trade seating positions; Mom was now the driver, I sat behind mom, my youngest sister sat in the front passenger seat and my other sister sat behind her, next to me. The car was dead silent because of our argument with none of us talking. After mom drove for a little bit, I felt the car slide again. I urged mom to stop and pull over but because it wasn’t raining any longer, she insisted on keeping going. It happened once or twice more before we wrecked. Mom kept refusing to pull over. Her stated logic was that we didn’t have time to let everything dry up before we needed to be home to get dad his dinner. She was right about that; we would have been late getting dad his dinner that day if we had stopped. Instead, she wasn’t able to make dad’s dinners for a long time beginning that day.

Every time the car slid while mom was driving, it caught right away and didn’t slide very far, until it finally didn’t catch. We were going around a curve, but the car kept going straight. I saw a dirt road in front of us leaving the highway and it looked like mom was trying to steer us toward there. I thought we might make it and the vehicle traveling toward us in the opposite lane might miss us. From here everything is a kaleidoscope of slow-motion images and sounds and feelings. Just as it looked like we might escape, the front wheel drive car caught traction and whipped us ninety-degrees straight head-on into the oncoming lane. Mom said, “Here we go!” That’s when the sound started. It was so loud you could feel it inside you, like it was part of you. It was like being inside a freight train whistle and at the epicenter of an explosion all at once in slow motion. Metal screamed as it was torn apart. Our car battery exploded with a loud boom outside the car right next to my mom. There was a huge groan as we were wrenched away in the opposite direction just as the step-van’s wheel wedged into our windshield right in front of my mom. I remember the sun breaking through the clouds just then and shining on the shards of glass that seemed at that moment to be suspended in air. I’m not sure how mom and I weren’t killed outright. I don’t know what it was, but something caused our car to spin out from under the van which stopped within fifteen feet from the point of impact still traveling in the same direction. I think the driver got a sprained ankle, but I am pretty foggy about what happened to him. We ended up about one-hundred-fifty feet from the point of impact down the road in our initial direction of travel, facing the wrong way back on our side of the road. I believe mom was cited by the State Police for “crossing the center line”.

None of us were wearing seat-belts and air bags weren’t a thing yet. My middle sister looked the least injured out of all of us, but she impacted the front seat with her face and ribs. She was in shock right away and had a real hard time figuring out what was going on. My youngest sister hit the dash with her face and then the windshield, but she somehow wasn’t ejected. Both of my legs got shoved up under the front seat and my head impacted the door post between the front seat and the back. Mom was hurt worse than any of the rest of us, but I couldn’t see her from where I was. I could only hear her moaning that her leg hurt.

There was a lot of blood and smoke and a really acrid smell, probably from the battery that blew up next to mom. My bell was rung pretty good, but I started trying to check on my middle sister who was sitting next to me holding her ribs and rocking back and forth. When I got her to respond, she kept asking over and over “What happened? Is mom okay?” I told her everything was going to be okay and to just stay where she was for now. I tried to check on my youngest sister and when she looked at me, her face was so cut up it looked like fresh ground hamburger meat. My heart was in my throat when I told her it was going to be okay. She said she couldn’t see, and I was so scared she was blind, I almost started weeping. I could see the bloody imprint of her face in the shattered windshield. I couldn’t see mom from where I was, so I got out of the car, at least I tried to. I had to force the door open to get out and when I tried to walk, my right leg gave way and I fell down on the ground next to mom’s door. I could hear her moaning and crying, “It hurts. My leg hurts. It’s broken and it hurts. It hurts real bad.”

I was trying to grab mom’s door when someone helped me up and put me back in the car in my seat and told me to stay there. I’m not sure who it was. I remember asking them if there was a fire because everything looked so red to me. I figured out later it was because of the blood running down into my eyes from the cut on my forehead. I’m not certain but the person I talked to could have been my dad’s boss (also my old boss), who just happened to be driving by right after our accident. It was very weird seeing him there but I’m glad he was. There were no cell phones in 1983 and he had a two-way radio in his truck. I think that is how the rescue folks showed up so fast. He also had the company notify dad which could have also taken a lot longer.

I know I talked to the paramedics, but I don’t remember what I said. My sisters have told me they heard me telling the paramedics about all our injuries and the assessments I had made. I guess some muscle memory from my lifeguard first-aid training kicked in. They got all of us into the ambulance except my mom. They had to use the Jaws-of-Life to extract her from the vehicle. I can remember the sound it made. The hydraulics sounded like a car lift and the car sounded like it was screaming again. We could hear mom screaming over the sound of the car and the Jaws-of-Life. The rescue folks took us to the hospital before they got mom all the way out and I was pretty upset. I didn’t want to leave her, and I was pretty sure we wouldn’t see her alive again. I later heard the paramedics talking, saying that it was the worst wreck they had ever seen where everyone lived.

They brought the three of us to this little county hospital, which was maybe 5 patient rooms. They had us in Emergency working on us when they brought mom in where we were. She was incoherent and moaning and crying a lot. I remember my sisters crying and me telling them it would be okay. They finally separated me from the rest and when they finished working on me, mom and my youngest sister were already gone. They moved my youngest sister with mom to a bigger hospital in Fayetteville because they were worried about broken facial bones and potential damage to her eyes, although it turned out nothing was broken, and her vision is (mostly) okay. My middle sister and I had to spend the night at that small country hospital by ourselves because of our concussions but at least we got to spend the night in the same room. I remember she was moaning and crying most of the night and my head hurt so bad I couldn’t sleep.