This will be a multi-part diary covering my experiences with being hit by a car while at work, going through the healthcare system, the legal system and how I escaped with my life and avoided bankruptcy. Keep in mind while reading this that this was a perfect storm of tragedy and insanity. I brought some of these issues on myself and my ex wife spent a lot of time looking for ways to torture me. Part two is already written and I am just checking dates etc.
In May of 1998 I was hit by a car while working on Route 80 in New Jersey. Since that night I have managed to keep my head up and plug along with my life. But today, today was the final straw. I have been keeping my mouth shut this whole time out of fear that I would be taunted, laughed at, called a shiftless layabout. I am at the point now where I want people to know that the system is definitely broken. I want people to know what it is like to be at the mercy of these people and their money. So please, stick with this series of diary entries I am going to post here.
May 19, 1998. I was 25 years old. I was doing pretty well. I had around ten thousand dollars in the bank. Living with my girlfriend in a nice three family house. She was six months pregnant. We were weeks away from closing on our first home. Beautiful 4 bedroom Victorian on a sleepy suburban street in my hometown. Her parents had given us a choice of helping with a down payment or paying for the wedding. We had no plans on marrying (we were both children of divorce and thought the whole thing made life sticky), so we jumped at choice B. She was an X-Ray tech. I was a foreman of a roadway sweeping crew charged with sweeping north Jersey highways. Things were pretty good.
I had a meeting with the DOT that day about exit ramps and in particular, how best to handle to exit ramp off of Route 80 entering Saddle Brook and the Garden State Parkway. It was my opinion that the closing would have to be done very late and would likely still be dangerous. I was told that we should have no issues at all with the equipment we already had. Obviously, drunk drivers or careless idiots could always be an issue but with the territory comes the risks.
So that night we struck out on cleaning exit ramps in the west bound direction. Two very large Wittke Road Wizard sweepers, a debris truck, a tandem dump truck, a single axle dump truck (more commonly known as the crash truck) with an attenuator and arrow board. We had two men working the orange flags slowing traffic down and directing the cars to the next exit when they got past the attenuator. (FYI-an attenuator is the big yellow block you see mounted on many trucks with arrow boards, it is designed to absorb the impact of a car causing minimal damage to the occupants of the car and to the truck housing it as well as preventing the car from careening through a construction site)
The Yankees were playing Baltimore. In between ramps I kept getting updates on the game over the AM radio. The Yankees were hot that year. I had just finished listening to the brawl when we started the east bound parkway ramp. I exited the debris truck and sent two guys with shovels to help clean the corners where the sweepers were having trouble. I grabbed my flag and headed back to the "Crash truck" to tell the driver what the plan of attack was for moving forward after this ramp. We both were expecting newborns in the coming months. His third, my first. When I saw the headlights coming down the road. I started waving the flag and as it got closer we both noticed it was in the closed lane heading for the crash truck. He braced for impact and I started backing up when the driver inexplicably swerved to her left to avoid the crash truck and the open lane. I immediately jumped on the fuel tank and tried to climb into the truck through the window when the driver of the car swerved back to her right to avoid hitting the cement barrier and right into the fuel tank I was standing on.
There was no pain at first. Things went black real fast and I swear time slowed to a crawl. Describing the things in my head during that second is difficult at best and unbelievable to me even now and has no bearing on the rest of this so please excuse me for not writing about it here.
I knew I was hit. I didn't make it in the window. I landed on my feet. The fuel tank was gone. I couldn't hear anything. My left shoe was also gone and my right leg was on my ankle and wow there was a lot of blood. The articles from yesterday about swearing and pain are true. I dropped about ten F bombs in a row, looked to my right, saw more cars coming and realized I was not out of the woods. I also realized I couldn't breathe. I started walking towards the front of the truck and taking off my clothes. I think I was taking off my clothes because I couldn't breathe. I was worried briefly about losing control of my bowels and my bladder because those were the first parts of my body that I could feel again. As I got around the front of the truck I saw the fuel tank about ten feet in front of me. I couldn't figure out how it wound up that far away. After all, I had just been standing on it. I made it to the shoulder and collapsed. The pain overtook me and I couldn't stop moving my legs. My coworkers were around me and asking me what I needed; water, blankets, the ambulance is on the way. Then there was a nurse from a rehab clinic who was going to perform some initial first aid. She started to cut my right pant leg off to see where I was bleeding from. I remember her nearly vomiting at the sight of my fibula sticking out of my leg. Then I remember hearing screaming and panic. The driver of the car was an 18 year old hispanic woman who had made her way over to me to try and convert me to catholicism judging from the amount of times she invoked the name of her lord. I asked one of my guys to make sure that my girlfriend wasn't called because she was pregnant and asleep and I didn't want to make this situation worse. When my brother arrived (before the ambulance) he promised to go get her and tell her I fell off a truck and broke my ankle and I was alright. That was when I started breathing and trying to calm myself.
The ambulance and state troopers arrived and loaded me up and off we went to Hackensack University Medical Center where I was immediately hooked up to a morphine drip and prepped for surgery. While I laid on a stretcher trying to stay conscious, the drivers parents had arrived. Thankfully they were not as hysterical. Apparently, during times of extreme emotional distress, these people turned to prayer. And prayer in their native tongue at that. And they even brought a rosary for me. All I wanted was my lunch.
Well, surgery followed, then a week in the ICU, then another week in a room that wasn't in the ICU. Then one day this guy comes in with crutches and tells me that in order for me to go home, I would need to learn to use the crutches and have at least one bowel movement. I told him if I was able to get to the bathroom, I would oblige. He then told me, "Just to let you know, when your legs go below your upper body, you will feel an extreme amount of pain in your legs." This man should have won an award for understatement of the year.
I was on a morphine drip for seven days, two vicodin every 4 - 6 hours. I had two broken ankles, a broken fibula, my right foot was crushed. I had a hard cast on my left leg and a soft cast on my right leg due to the amount of skin loss.
I sat up on the bed and my legs were dangling off it like a little kid. The pain was unbelievable and I dropped enough swears to make a pirate blush. It took a good two minutes for me to stop and proceed. The plan was bear my weight on my left leg with the hard cast and hold my right leg off the ground and use the crutches to propel me. This proved to be quite difficult, but I realized, with a little effort and practice, I could make it to and from the bathroom or wherever I had to get to.
Almost immediately after this episode, a woman came to my room and introduced herself as my case worker and she was sent by the insurance company. She said she would be working with me during the recovery phase. I thought that things were looking good. After all, I had insurance through my union, my company had insurance, the driver had insurance. It wasn't like I jumped in front of this car. Everything would work out fine. Yeah, the whole possibility of infection or a blood clot was real fucking scary, but I was alive, had a child on the way and was just wheeled outside to see my dog Jake. And I have a rep from the insurance company assigned to my case to make sure nothing goes wrong.
Hey, I was twenty-five. WTF did I know? It seemed like everything should be o.k.
They sent me home that first week of June. They wheeled me out of the hospital and gave me my list of appointments. They even helped me in my dad's car and gave me crutches. When we got to my apartment, we realized it was going to be difficult to get me up to the third floor, but I figured the easiest way was on my ass backwards and no crutches. It worked. I got inside, my girlfriend gave me my urine bottle, the remote, turned the air on, gave me a glass of water and my next round of pills. Everyone then left. Life goes on. About fifteen minutes into my post hospital recovery, the phone rang. That was the one thing she forgot to give me.
Keep in mind, in 1998, not everyone had voice mail. Some of us had answering machines. After the message beep, this shrill woman was screaming. She was screaming at me. It was my case worker berating me for leaving the hospital without notifying her. She did this not once, but three times.
For the last three weeks, I had been having trouble sleeping. I was sleeping in three hour intervals. Six hours a night if I was lucky. I also noticed that I didn't like hearing any arguing, yelling, fighting or any kind of confrontation at all, even on t.v. or talk radio. It made me very nervous. I would fight for hours to make that anxiety go away. The sounds of this woman screaming at me for not notifying me was horrible. I couldn't understand it. I couldn't understand how I forgot to tell her. I don't even remember anyone telling me to do that. My mind was racing. Did I just cause some sort of harm to my recovery? When my girlfriend arrived back home, she heard the messages and called my attorney who was representing me. I was finally able to calm down.
The case worker was upset because there were things that I needed that I didn't have. A toilet seat that goes on top of my toilet seat. A RN to come to my house twice a day to change my bandages on my open wound, a wheelchair/walker in addition to the crutches, and she needed to set up the ensuing round of doctors appointments and rehab appointments and arrange transportation. Thank insurance!
My first doctors appointment was surreal. A van came to pick me up. They forgot the wheelchair. Mine still wasn't delivered because I failed to notify the Insurance company I was being discharged so they could not secure one for me. So I crawled down the stairs on my ass and was helped into the van by the driver old enough to be my grandfather and unable to bear my 180 lb frame. So it was more like being guided to the van.
At the doctor's office I was met by my case worker. The case worker, my girlfriend and me all piled into the doctor's exam room where I was told to be mindful of any pains, do my breathing exercises so I wouldn't get pneumonia, and to keep an eye out for excess bleeding. The prognosis: six weeks until I could start physical therapy. Walking with a cane or walker by early August. Possibly back to work by September at the earliest.
And with that, we are at the end of the beginning. All seems well at this point. A few hiccups, a few eyebrow raises but all in all everything seems to be progressing fine. Please stay tuned for my next entry where I will cover among other things, moving into the new house, my shotgun and possibly illegal wedding, the birth of my son, my own personal "death panel" circa 1998, and the fifth worst winter of my life. Don't worry, the other winters will soon follow. (Part two should be ready in a week or so)