August 2010 | One Month after the Accident

In the fuzzy, floating seconds after impact that warm July night, between the recognition of splintered bones and the reality of crushed metal, I remembered wondering how long this accident would inconvenience me, how long until I could get home.

I never imagined it would be thirty-two days.

I still needed medical attention on a regular basis but not enough to take up a bed in a rehabilitation center. I could get around my apartment in the Victorian with my wheelchair or walker, and I had Mom for help. She had inhabited my spare bedroom shortly after the accident and now she was to be my live-in nurse, caring for me just as she had when I was a little girl. I was grateful to have her here, but at the same time, at age forty-one, I resented having a babysitter.

Whatever medical needs of mine Mom couldn’t handle, home health-care nurses would. They were scheduled to visit several times a week to change my wound vac dressing, check my injuries, and make sure I was healing.

My first appointment was set for the morning after I returned home.

As soon as she arrived, Sharon, dark-haired and petite, held out her hand and introduced herself as an RN from an area home-nursing company.

“I’m just going to review your hospital notes here, and then we’ll get started,” Sharon said as she pulled a file from her bag and smiled. She had a kind face and a gentle manner.

Sharon had read from her files, turning many pages, when I heard her say, “Oh.” She had encountered a surprise about me—probably all of the fractured bones, or maybe my punctured lungs, the ventilator. Maybe she hadn’t been expecting so many injuries.

“I see here that you were resuscitated?” she asked.

Resuscitated. The word echoed in my head.

Had I heard her correctly?

“I’m sorry?”

Sharon looked up from her paperwork and smiled again.

“You were resuscitated,” she said quietly. “Did you know that?”

I was stunned. No one told me.

Resuscitated?

I swallowed and shook my head.

“Hey, Mom? Can you come in here?”

Mom appeared almost immediately. She must have heard something in the tone of my voice that worried her.

“Sharon said it’s in my records that I was resuscitated.”

Sharon nodded, as Mom turned to her with wide eyes.

“Oh, wow,” Mom said. “We didn’t know that.”

Sharon looked back down at the paperwork again.

“It says right here that you were in hemorrhagic shock due to blood loss and had to be resuscitated,” she explained.

My body had lost so much blood because of internal bleeding that it had gone into shock. The blood-thinning medication I took because of my heart attack probably had made things worse. I remembered Jorden yelling from behind me in the car when the voice at my window wanted to know who I was: “That’s Aimee Young! She’s had a heart attack before!”

And thank God she did. The EMTs and the doctors where I was first taken might have acted more quickly in assessing me and calling for Life Flight because of it. In fact, Jorden probably saved my life that night. With that much internal trauma, every second would have counted, and Jorden’s smart warning might have saved me from going into shock mid-air. Sharon said I had been resuscitated in Cleveland shortly after the helicopter’s arrival.

Resuscitated.

Revived.

Dead or almost dead.

The other driver had died that night, and now I knew more precisely how close I’d come to dying, too.

The rest of Sharon’s visit was what I expected: she checked my vitals and injuries, asked about my medication use, and changed my wound vac dressing. But what she had told me about being resuscitated rattled me.

I needed to think about it.

I stopped living. Doctors brought me back.

I thought of the voice I heard in the car that night—strange, quiet, and firm. Almost otherworldly. Stop moving or you will die.

It couldn’t have been an EMT, because they were outside the car. This voice was inside the car, right beside me. In my ear.

A warning. The voice knew how serious my injuries were before doctors, even EMTs, did.

Stop moving or you will die.

And I had. Almost.

“Can you believe that?” Mom asked after Sharon left. “After everything you’ve gone through, now we find out you were...”

Resuscitated, I thought, as her voice trailed off. Sharon’s announcement hung in the heavy summer humidity of my living room.

Tears filled my eyes, and my chin started to quiver.

“Do you remember it?” Mom asked. Then as an afterthought, “Hey, did you see a white light or anything?”

Her comment took me by surprise, and I giggled, even as I cried. I knew she was trying to make light of the situation because she didn’t want me upset. And we’ve all heard about those near-death, crossing-over-the-brink, white-light/bright-light experiences.

I shook my head.

“Mom, no.”

“I’m just asking,” she said. “That’s what they say happens, you know.”

I replayed the loop of memories I had from that night in my mind just to be sure. No lights, no visions, nothing. Just that voice in the car, cautionary and guiding.

“I don’t remember anything after they put me in the helicopter.”

“Wow,” she said again.

I was horrified once more by the magnitude of that life-changing split second. One young life was gone before he’d even really lived.

His injuries were fatal. He couldn’t be saved.

But I could.

• • •

Before I knew it, I had settled into a comfortable daily routine that revolved around TV shows and meals, unless Mom was chauffeuring me to any number of scheduled medical follow-ups. The first, while still in my wheelchair, was with my family dentist to see if he could fix my broken smile. I was embarrassed and self-conscious without my front tooth.

After looking at the damage done inside my mouth, Dr. Steve recommended dental implants for both teeth—the missing one in the front and the broken one in the back—and an oral surgeon to start the process. It would be time-consuming, taking anywhere from six months to a year or more, but he assured me the results would be worth it.

“Quite frankly,” he told me, “you should get permanent implants. You did not do this to yourself, and you have the right to have your teeth back the way they were.”

I fought back tears. Someone understood. He understood.

Dr. Steve had summed up in one sentence how I felt about my entire life now, and his words applied to more than my teeth. I had not caused the changes in my body any more than I alone had caused my marriage to crumble. I deserved to have my body and my life—a home, my children—back the way they had been.

But neither would ever be one hundred percent again.

Dr. Peterson, who put me back together, told me that one day my body would be normal again, but only ninety percent. I would never be completely normal again.

And even if I had my own home one day, I had come to realize that my children would never live with me again. Sure, they would come stay with me, and yes, they would always need their mother, but the bedrooms of my children—where they slept every night—were in what was now their father’s house. A place they had called home for thirteen years, and for Connor, all of his life.

I held in my tears and smiled a toothless smile.

Implants. Two new teeth.

In the meantime, the gap in the front of my mouth would be filled with a removable partial denture the dentist called a “flipper,” which I would wear while my gums healed and until the brand-new teeth were in place. My flipper would come back from the lab two weeks later and fit the spot perfectly while I awaited my new teeth. Unless you looked closely or noticed the thickness of my speech, you would never know it was fake.

That flipper would restore some of my confidence, and I wore it for more than a year. My broken smile was fixed! True, it was temporary and removable, and no, it wasn’t the award-winning best smile in the LHS Class of ’87, but it was still mine. (Those commercials for dental centers that promise a brand-new smile in just one day because of same-day dental implants have to be lying or not doing something correctly, because it certainly was nothing like that in my case.)

Fourteen months later, after the implants and crowns were completely in place, I would peer into the dentist’s hand mirror and notice something very interesting: Not only did both teeth fill their spots well, but my new front tooth was whiter, smoother, and better than the old one. It was perfect. Maybe even more beautiful than before. Finally, my smile was back!

When I returned home that day, I took the flipper out of the pocket of my purse and held it in the palm of my hand. What should I do with it? I wanted to throw it away and never lay eyes on it again, but I was afraid to. It had been my vanity’s safeguard, a friend who filled a void. A void I never wanted to feel again. I decided to keep it just in case.

I pulled a Ziploc baggie from the kitchen drawer, placed the mouthpiece inside, and smoothed the closure with my fingers. I put it inside the bathroom’s mirrored medicine cabinet on a shelf and closed the door. I knew I would keep the flipper forever, and for so many, many reasons.

I leaned in to the mirror as close as I could and bared my front teeth. Ah, yes. My front tooth was back. And it was pretty. I was pretty.

I smiled at Aimee.

I could tell from her reflection that it felt good to have a secure smile in place again, because she was beaming back at me.