Candace West
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1
Funnily enough, I don’t completely remember when my chronic pain(s) started. I do, however, remember clearly the incident that eventually led to the pain. In the summer of 2001, I was t-boned by a Jeep Grand Cherokee. She drove straight into my car, which actually wasn’t my car—a roommate had left her big blue Volvo (which really was boxy but good) on campus and asked/allowed me to drive it so it didn’t just sit unused. The suv hit me on the passenger side, which was maybe the best luck I had that day. I feel like I’ve forgotten the details of the vast majority of things that happened in 2001; there’s basically the 9/11 attacks, the train trip I took just after the attacks, and the accident, which happened a few weeks, maybe a month before them. I don’t remember the date of the accident, but I remember in vivid detail watching the suv bear down on me and thinking, “She’s going to hit me.” And then she did.
2
I’d heard that people often experience moments of crisis in slow motion, and that was definitely true for me. Once I realized she was going to hit me, it felt like everything slowed down. When you hear cars crash in a film, the sound is almost like a chord--a low thud of heavy things colliding, midtones of skidding tires and scraping metal, and the high-pitched tinkling of shards of glass. But I only heard the flat punch of the impact, then everything went silent. I don’t remember the sound of the window breaking, but I remember how it was whole and then suddenly wasn’t. I hadn’t seen that she wasn’t going to stop until it was too late. But when she hit me, my vision grew sharp enough to see each tiny piece of shattered glass hang there, suspended just for an instant before they started to fall. I was surprised to see that more of it ended up on the hood of the other vehicle than inside the car. I remember watching the passenger side curve in toward me and wondering if it would keep coming toward me. I remember screaming, but not because I was afraid of getting injured: my laptop was on the passenger seat, and my dissertation-in-progress was on that laptop. It’s probably telling, and not in a positive way, that at a moment when I might very well have been afraid for my wellbeing, if not for my life, the scariest thing to me was that my dissertation might get hurt. And then physics caught up with me. My left thigh came up off the seat a little as my body fell to the right, my right ear meeting my right shoulder. Then I was flung the other way, and my hearing kicked back in just in time to hear two staggered “thumps” as the left side of my body—first the arm, then the shoulder, and finally my head—slammed into the driver side door and window.
3
The accident happened just a few yards away from the campus police and fire stations, so help came quickly. A very kind police officer held a clipboard over my face while I was, as a precaution, strapped down, face up, immobilized on a stretcher. That was kind of her, but I thanked her most profusely for rescuing my dissertation before I got separated from the car.
I was in full-on Robocop mode for a few days after the accident—I couldn’t turn or lean my head to the left at all and could barely do so to the right. I don’t remember how long it took to get over the acute injury. But several months later, at some point after I thought I was fine, I started experiencing a set of symptoms no one (including me) tied to the accident for a long time: neck pain and stiffness; burning nerve pain in my head, neck and arms; a perpetual feeling like I’d hit my funny bone; slightly numb fingers; and migraines that started in my right eye. Stage 1 is a tingle in my eye and eyelid. At stage 2, the tingle sharpens, and it feels like someone trying to gently push a frozen knitting needle out through my eye. Stage 3 progresses to the sensation of something clawing its way out like the chestbreaker in Alien. Over the years, the migraines went from occasional to frequent to chronic, so I spent a good (that is to say horrible) portion of the next two decades feeling like someone had poured a trail of gasoline down my right side and set it on fire.