39 years ago on this date…

Later the same year, 1972, I was riding my bike to school on a Tuesday morning, the same way I did almost every day, going down 40th Avenue (a big hill), when a brown car (that had a stop sign) pulled out in front of me and stopped. I couldn’t stop – I was going too fast. When I was so close to the car I knew I would hit it, I turned my head to the left and blacked out. I heard a dull thud, then the next thing I knew, I woke up for a minute and saw all these people standing around me, so tall. I thought I was dreaming, lying on the street. I thought, ‘they will take care of me.’ I closed my eyes and the next time I woke up, I was in the hospital emergency room. I kept hearing the names of doctors who were fathers to my classmates, and when I tried to ask the nurses, “Is that Todd’s dad? Is that Nancy’s dad?” they just ignored me. Then my mom was there, crying, so I started crying. She asked me why I was crying and I said it was because she was crying, so she stopped crying, and I also stopped. I went out again and when I opened my eyes the next time, I was in a room and Mom told me I had a broken shoulder and stitches in my chin. Later I was told by witnesses to the accident that I flew up in the air about 15-20 feet, came down with my chin on the car just above the window, the driver of the car drove away, and my shoulder broke my fall on the pavement. It’s probably a good thing that I blacked out (thank God!) because my muscles were relaxed and I could have been much more seriously hurt. Also during my black-out state, I had a conversation with a neighbor I hadn’t talked to in years, as if we were best friends, and I also gave the policeman my name, address and phone number. I had no memory of those two conversations.
So it was a hit-and-run, and they found the 76-year-old driver at a doctor’s office downtown. I ended up with a body cast, with my left arm sticking straight forward from my shoulder, and 21 stitches in my chin. Although the cut went completely through my skin into my mouth, just below my lower lip, I didn’t lose or chip any teeth! When I came out of the hospital 5 days later, I weighed 15 pounds less with my body cast than I did that morning before the accident. Today I still have the scar on my chin, but it is much faded.