Total Pageviews

Saturday 27 October 2012

A Car Crash, Sleep Meds, and a Divine Revelation ...


I’m afraid I’ve fallen in love.
With whom? No my dear, it’s “with what?” And the answer is “natural sleep enhancers”. It’s been a long week. After going to the chiropractor’s a while back, and coming home in immense pain and basically losing my mind, my chiropractor said that I needed to get my neck x-rayed before he’d mess with me anymore. I told him at the beginning of the appointment that I had been in a snowmobile accident and my neck had hurt for three weeks after, yet it never occurred to me that it might have been a little more than hurt. So anyhow, I went in for x-rays. Twice. They told me that there’s something growing on my neck. It could be extra bone growth from a previous fracture (such as when I crashed), A cyst (which would make sense because I get cysts on my wrists all the time.), or…..a tumor. Obviously when you’re a dramatic seventeen year old girl, your mind goes to the worst option, settles in it, and you start mentally writing your will. So after I left the office I told my mother “Hey mom, guess what? I might have cancer!” (I’m paraphrasing) so then after the x-ray results were sent to my chiropractor, he’s like; “You need an MRI with contrast so we can rule out the possibility of it being a tumor.”
Let me just say this: I AM FREAKING TERRIFIED OF NEEDLES. When my mother told me I had to get an MRI, I felt as if I could throw up. When I told my best guy friend, Jon, about it, he actually did throw up. I guess that’s what it means to be worried sick.
So that’s when my week started getting stressful. My MRI is on Halloween. Cool right? Yeah, I get to have a needle shoved in my arm, and get locked in a tube for an hour, ON Halloween. Thankfully I have medication to sedate me significantly.
I still cannot even begin to explain how awful those first two days of worrying were. Oh and this is where the sleep enhancers come into play. Yeah, I found out that they calm me down. Hallelujah. I’ve been slathering on the sleep balm religiously.
Anyhow, on my third day of worrying, I volunteered at a Young Life banquet at the fairgrounds with my friends from Bible Study. We were the cleanup crew and after cleaning up we all got in our respective cars and started leaving. One of my friends was driving his mom’s awesome car and he did this sick burnout in front of me. I saw this as a challenge. I also thought it’d be fun to blow off some steam seeing as my stress levels were at an all time high. So I spun out and followed him. After peeling out onto the main road I thought I’d pass him because the road was deserted. He was going way too fast though and I knew I’d have to go way over the speed limit to catch him, something I wasn’t willing to do. So I started slowing down and driving normal when I lost control. It felt like someone grabbed my steering wheel and turned it sharp to the left and then the right over and over again. A car drove by and I begged God to not let me hit them. Then suddenly I was flying towards the ditch. I remember bracing my arms on the steering wheel to hold myself as far away from the air bag as possible. I knew this ditch (which was in front of the fairgrounds still, I didn’t make it very far) was relatively deep and when I hit it, I would either die or I would break my neck the rest of the way and total the car.  Cool huh? The last thing I thought before I jumped the curb and landed in the ditch was, “My life hasn’t flashed before my eyes yet….I thought that was supposed to happen when you’re getting ready to die?!”
 Then it was over. I felt my car jump the curb and land in the ditch, I braced myself, strangely enough I didn’t scream, and it was over. I shut the car off and jumped out. At first I thought all my friends had left but then my friends Hannah, Nathan, and Matt were behind this eight foot fence on the other side of the ditch. They yelled at me to sit down and not move, then Matt jumped over the fence (I’m telling you, it was a super tall fence) like a ninja (which was really awesome considering that he’s scared of heights) and Nathan and Hannah ran around the fence. Matt demanded that I sit down and so I sat in the ditch and flopped on my back. Then I realized….my parents. They’re going to kill me. I think I murmured that several times before Hannah and Bizzy were there and they started trying to talk me down. I was hysterical, shaking, and then suddenly the whole cleanup crew was there. All I really remember was running around my car freaking out, the rain starting up, telling Matt to pinch me just to make sure it was real, trying to call my mom, Jon showing up out of nowhere looking like he was going to throw up again (Yeah, I put the kid through a lot this week…), and then….the cop showed up. Now, I have a great respect for police officers. My neighbor is one and I’m just like, don’t move away! Ever! I feel safe now! But at the same time, a cop is the last thing you want to see after you just wrecked your mom’s car.  Actually…your mom is the last thing you want to see after you wreck her car. You know what I mean though.
By the time the cop got there, the guys (Matt, Nathan, Corey, Mark, Jon, and whoever else I might be forgetting…I was really out of it) had got my car back on the road and changed one of the tires. One or two were coming off the rims and the front driver’s side tire was flat as a pancake. So the cop pulls over and he asks what the heck we’re doing. Someone explained, he yells some more, and then he says he’ll be back in a minute. While he’s gone, I break free of my girlfriends and rip the “Nobama Nomore” magnet off my back bumper just in case the cop is an Obama supporter (anything to calm him down). Then the man comes walking over. I can see the steam pouring out of his ears and the fire coming out of his nostrils. I felt like I was going to pass out and I mumbled something about getting arrested to which Corey replied, “Holly, your tire blew. It wasn’t your fault. You weren’t driving recklessly when it happened.” It was as if a weight was lifted off my shoulders. I had a chance. Maybe he wouldn’t arrest me.
So the officer, seeing that I was in no shape to explain what was going on, because I didn’t know, started questioning my friends. He basically asked Hannah if I was drunk (understandable had you seen me at the time) and then he asked for my license (After he chewed us out about changing tires on the road and the fact that my friends had all parked in the road behind me). So I gave him my license and he asked me for my insurance and registration. I told him that I would look for it but it’d probably take me a few minutes because I’d never been pulled over before so I wasn’t sure what it looked like. He said it wasn’t funny and I should darn well know where it is. Then Corey shouts, “I’ve been pulled over hundreds of times! I’ll find it!” to which the cop again replies, “That isn’t funny.”
Long story short, after pulling my car into a parking lot nearby, the cop gave me my stuff back and said he was going to let me go. My car was okay besides the tires so no accident report was needed and he wasn’t going to give me a ticket because technically the accident was not my fault. I all but fell to the ground and kissed his feet. The worst was over.
Oh wait. No it wasn’t. I still had to face my parents.
When I told them, my mother didn’t know what else to do so she burst in to hysterical laughter (much like she does when she’s in immense pain) and my father stared off into space not saying anything, yet at times, trying not to look somewhat amused.
I actually did learn a lesson from all this. A few actually.
One- I’m going to drive like a grandma for the rest of my life.
Two- I have the best friends EVER. They stayed with me the whole time, taking care of me and the car, and dealing with the officer, IN THE RAIN.  They’re flat out amazing people and I don’t know what I would do without them. <3
Three- God does have a plan for my life. I know, I’ve heard it a thousand times. You’ve heard it a thousand times. God has a plan. God has a plan. God has a plan. I heard it, rejoiced in it, and never understood it fully until God visibly saved my life that night. When I crashed, I literally felt as if I was being held. Protected. And Hannah pointed out to me later that I was a mere two feet away from hitting some sort of electrical box that would’ve killed me when I jumped out of my car, if not, before. And just the way that the car landed in the ditch perfectly so that it wasn’t dented anywhere. That was a God thing. The way I didn’t hit the car coming toward me? Yeah, that was a God thing too. It was as if God let me go through something terrifying to wake me up and say, in a Haymitch sort of way for all my Hunger Games groupies, “Hey sweetheart, wake up. Stop wasting your time. Do something. Move.” Up until Thursday, my world basically revolved around me. I lived for myself. Now I don’t feel that way. What am I going to do with my life now? Well it’s not my life. Its God’s life, He gave it to me. Now I’m going to give it back. Those who find their lives, lose them. Those who lose their lives, find them. Let’s just say that I think I lost my life Thursday night at around 10:15.
Oh, and you know what else? I’m not worried about the MRI anymore. I feel like, after Thursday, this will be a piece of cake. God was obviously with me when I crashed and he’s obviously going to be with me when I’m locked in a tube. With a needle in my arm. On Halloween.