You’re driving up into the mountains for a weekend getaway when a sedan veers into your lane. Your car is moving approximately fifty miles per hour. So is the other automobile, which is being driven by a man in the throes of a heart attack. (The police report will say the man was dead before impact.) The sedan crosses the centerline and crashes directly into you. You shout out in surprise an instant before you’re hit.

Open your eyes. Close them. Open them. The windshield is spread out on your lap in a blanket of chipped ice. Smoke oozing from car engines. Your partner is slumped in the front seat beside you, eyes shut tight. You can’t tell if she is breathing. You look back at your eight-year-old boy, seated in the back behind his mother: eyes wide open, he has been brought to silence by the shock. You look back just as your wife draws a large breath.

The man and woman from the car in front of you arrive at your windows. Their teenage son takes your boy away and sits him down on a nearby grass embankment. You don’t know it yet, but he has walked out of the wreck unharmed except for a minor case of whiplash and a serious seatbelt burn on his chest. Your wife, eyes clenched shut, nods when you ask if she is okay. Later, you will learn she has broken an arm, both her legs (even breaks on both tibias). One of her heels has been crushed. Your feet are both broken—one a simple ankle break, the other a more complicated set of breaks inside the foot. They remain stuck up in the well and have begun throbbing in pain. Your femur has snapped in two places (dead center and at the hip), cracking the patella in the process. Your sternum has cracked as well, along with fourteen ribs. Later, a doctor will inform you that both your heart and lungs have been “bruised” and a small piece of spinal cord has chipped off. Lucky it didn’t land somewhere it shouldn’t, he will say. No obvious head injuries. No internal bleeding. You are lucky to be alive.