The Day I Almost Lost Him

By now, if you are brave enough to follow my sometimes senseless ramblings on social media, you probably saw a more serious side this week. It started off with a doctor’s visit for my son to figure out why he’s been struggling with some type of cough/wheezing situation for the past month or so. I shared how I was at my wit’s end as he fought us tooth and nail to take his steroid meds – which in the end I figured out the syringe and candy/popsicle chaser did the trick…along with the opportunity to profess to daddy afterwards “I took my medicine and it was GROSS!” He’s still scared to death of the inhaler/aero chamber contraption – oh and don’t even get me started on the nebulizer (just ask the nurse about that one, if they ever invite us back). But so far, the meds alone have gotten rid of the cough, so I’m hopeful he’ll be getting a clean bill of health at his follow-up visit, and it’s not something more serious.

All that aside, and what really happened this week that shook me to the core, was a call at 9am on Wednesday from my husband saying “I have some bad news.” He was calling me from an ambulance taking him to Clear Lake Regional Hospital, because he had been in a car accident. He just kept saying “I have no idea what happened, I just can’t remember.” We tossed around the notion of him falling asleep at the wheel, or possibly just zoning out like you do sometimes when deep in thought. But what just didn’t add up is when he told me his pick-up truck had slammed into the back of an 18-wheeler. He still has no idea where it came from, and all he remembers are the airbags deploying. Even as another car rear-ended him causing his truck to spin around into oncoming traffic on I-45, all he could think of was A) There’s no way I’m going to not get hit again and live through this, and B) I don’t remember how I even hit that diesel truck. After two CT-scans and a few x-rays, the ER doctor confirmed he’d only suffered a muscle strain in his neck. He ruled out a seizure and told Grant that the memory lapse had to be from head trauma. It still only settled our nerves slightly, but I headed back home with an extremely nauseous husband who turned stark white as the nurse pulled quite possibly the largest needle I’d ever seen out of his arm. That honestly was the worst part for him, which is saying a lot considering.

In the days that followed, there was a definite sense of gratefulness that hung around us from the moment we kissed goodnight, to the moment we woke up in each others arms. It is true what they say though about all the ways you recount your last moments with the person before an accident. Did we kiss? Did I even tell him goodbye? Turns out, Garrett had woken up in the night which had me tossing and turning for hours after that, and I had just managed to get back to sleep right when Grant’s alarm started to go off. So that morning was the very rare occasion that I didn’t even attempt to wake up to kiss him goodbye before work. I do remember him leaning down and whispering that he was leaving for work, and all I could do was lay there. It was the first thing I thought of when I heard the news later that morning, and I couldn’t even allow myself to complete the thought of how I really would have felt had it been a much different outcome. He had left that morning without so much as a muttered goodbye from either Garrett or me, and it was as if God just couldn’t allow that to be our last goodbye.

Similar to how my dad was when it came to grave situations – we didn’t allow the gloom and doom of what “could have happened” to bring us down. Instead, anytime we felt those thoughts enter our minds in conversation, we’d joke about how we have “God and Dodge” to thank. I know it’s not right to say you’re thankful for something like this happening, but I will say that when you feel like you’ve been given a second chance to be a better wife – it’s a very humbling notion that I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life paying back the man upstairs for.