In the Beginning, A Bad Wreck, Trauma, Pain and Victimization....

  Midnight, Friday, April 13th, 1989, Riding my motorcycle home after a class at Georgia State University, I was hit broadside by a car.  The driver didn't stop until he was chased down by the police.  He made a U-turn, returned to the scene, ran over to where I was splayed out on the pavement. He then began screaming curses and proceeded to kick me several times in the ribs before being pulled away by police and bystanders. He was obviously drunk and on drugs.  It turned out that he was wanted by the police in three states for armed robbery.... I was grateful to be alive and happy not to be paralyzed, but the euphoria and adrenaline wore off long before the ambulance came.  My thirty minute wait was the beginning of a two month hospital ordeal that inflicted almost as much trauma as the accident itself.   I had multiple fractures and a pneumothorax (collapsed lung).  X rays showed that I had broken my seventh cervical vertebra years earlier.  Doctors were amazed that I had not been paralyzed. I said that explained why my neck hurt so bad for such a long time after a bad tackle playing high school football.  

  I should have been allowed to return home within a week, but my lung would re-collapse each time the doctor took me off the suction equipment.  It took six weeks before an intern pointed out that the tube in my lung was pushed into the interior wall, perhaps causing an irritation that prevented the lung from healing.  The poor intern was scolded by my doctor for questioning the wisdom of inserting a second tube.  That doctor was an idiot.  Of course, the intern was right and I was able to be discharged four days after the doctor grudgingly agreed to try pulling the tube out  a little.  In the time I spent in the hospital, I was given someone else's medication by mistake... for four days.  I was unplugged from the equipment that allowed me to breath in order to be taken to the X-Ray room, then abandoned in a hallway when I stopped breathing so the orderly could run faster for help.  I regained consciousness in my room an hour later.  I suffered from the side effects of taking coedine and dimerol as often as I requested it, which was about every four hours.

But my complaints are slim compared to the 34 year old man who died in the Emergency Room, waiting to be treated for a broken leg.  Workmen breaking the floor above with jackhammers freed a 3'x3' piece of concrete that fell through the ceiling and crushed him, killing him instantly...

  The point of sharing all this is to illustrate why, after a long and difficult experience, that I had little respect for modern medicine and hospitals.  I went home and back to work with lots of pain and an addiction to pain killers.  There was not a single part of me that did not hurt.  

In addition, I felt a boiling rage.  I was burning with anger at the idiot who had run me over and the idiots at the hospital.  Perhaps even worse was a feeling of powerlessness and impotence in face of the circumstance and suffering I found myself in.  My life was pain and rage.

Then I met Gene.