Austin ate my 4-Runner

So, Heather and I were driving back to Austin to look at a few more apartments that our nifty new pal Kevin-The-Apartment-Finder had to show us.  It was our second trip, and everything seemed innocent enough.  We were to meet Kevin at his office and after the 3 hour drive we had just exited I-35 and were making the left turn to enter his parking lot and then it happened.

Blammo.

A larger SUV than mine, a Ford Expedition I think, decided that he wanted through the intersection more than I did and blew through the light and slammed into the front-rightish side of my truck.  I remember seeing him coming and I remember Heather shouting "look out" at the exact same time, the next thing I remember was the world spinning around me, then after that the sight, smell and taste of some nasty chemical filling the truck and consequently our lungs.

In the second after we stopped moving I did a quick systems check — breathing (although choking on fumes) *check*, head mobility *check* arm mobility *check*, leg mobility *check*.  I wasn’t trapped and my side of the passenger compartment wasn’t crushed on top of me.

Me: "Heather, are you ok?"
H: "Stop moving your head, if your neck is hurt you can break it by moving your head."
Me: "Heather, ARE YOU OK!?"
H: "Stop moving around…"
Me: "HEATHER, ARE YOU OK!?"
H: "My back hurts, but I think I’m ok."
Me: "Christ, I can’t breathe and I can’t see shit."
H: "Stop moving…"
Me: "This fucking airbag shit… I can’t breathe."

So I proceed to open my door, and I can but it’s not helping.  I can roll the windows down (to my surprise), and the breeze wafts through and clears all the powder from the airbags out.  Yes, both driver and passenger bags deployed.  Yes, we both were wearing our seatbelts — take a lesson from this kids, always, and I mean ALWAYS wear your seatbelt, that plus the airbags is what saved our lives.

Once I can see Heather, I notice that she’s slouched in the seat a bit, pushed further down than she should have been.  I can’t see past the airbag draped over her lap to see if her side of the vehicle — which is the side that took the impact in the front — is crushing her or pinning her legs.  She’s calm but unwilling to move just in case there is a bigger problem she doesn’t know about (her EMT training coming into play here).  There is a slight trickle of blood coming from her nose and her face is flushed, a side effect of being punched in the face by the airbag.  A guy from the Jiffy Lube is the first on the scene.  He calmly states that he’s a mechanic, and that he was going to roll that airbag on Heather’s lap back up and tuck it away because the crap that was on it, the powder that makes it deploy smoothly and rapidly, would burn her legs if it sat there too long.  He advised that I do the same.

Heather: "Oh, that’s why my legs are burning."
Me: (mumbling to myself) "Yeah, I imagine that must be great for the lungs."

Shortly — VERY shortly — paramedics and cops are on the scene.  My brain has two conflicting thoughts 1) "Welcome to Austin," do I really want to move here and 2) holy crap, that was FAST for the first responders to get here, that makes me feel pretty good.  The paramedics calmly and confidently ask us how we are and where it hurts.  Heather tells them that her back hurts a bit and her neck on the right side does too.  I tell the guy that my right foot hurts a bit, but that I think I may have sprained it jamming the brakes down as hard as I did.  Frankly, I think I pulled a Fred Flintstone braking maneuver, shoving my foot through the floor of the car and onto the concrete below, but there is no evidence to back that up.  How I didn’t shatter an elbow or blow out a pectoral muscle, I have no idea… I was gripping the wheel so tightly, and bracing against it so firmly that I broke the tilt mechanism on the steering wheel and jammed the whole steering column into a vertical position.

The paramedics strap a collar on Heather and start preparing to put her on a spine-board.  I’m talking to the cops and showing all the relevant paperwork, giving my side of the story and basically making sure Heather is OK.  Our apartment guru shows up (me having called him at Heather’s request to say that we were in a wreck just outside of his office) and offers the world to us… transportation, a place to crash for the night, a computer to use, phones, whatever we need.  He’s a pretty decent guy.

I’m starting to notice that my foot is hurting more and more as time goes on.  The lead paramedic shows up and asks if I’m going to the hospital to get checked out, or if I’m just going for the ride.  I tell him that I’d like to get my foot looked at just in case there is something more than a sprain, but that I need to finish up at the scene with the cops.  He says that there isn’t much more to do, and that they’ll find me at the hospital to tell me where my car was towed to and any other relevant info.  I rummage through the car to get anything I or Heather might need… her backpack, all the rest of her shit that spilled out, my car info and anything that the might get stolen by the tow-yard.  I hop in the big white ambulance, and away we go.

Heather is calm and collected, strapped to a board that looks like it’s very uncomfortable.  I’m seat belted into the jump seat and we’re heading to what I am told is a trauma center that ranks pretty high in the country — giving Charity Hospital a run for it’s money in that department — "not because you’re that bad off, it’s just that close."  We show up and Heather is wheeled in one way, and I am led to the ER check-in another way because I am still ambulatory (fancy way to say "still walking around").  I go through the check in, get a preliminary screening and am told that I would be waiting a while because the place is filled up with refugees from NOLA who are staying in the shelter in Austin.

Everyone I have met in Texas has been superbly nice.  I mean shirt-off-their-back kinda’ nice, and the folks working in the ER were no exception.  Hell, while Heather and I were still sitting in the wrecked truck, the cops and paramedics were giving us advice on where to move to in Austin and where to look for jobs.  I had ER nurses nearly in tears when they found out that I not only lost my home in NOLA, but now my only remaining car.  Even the cops, when they came to give me news of the wreck and where my truck was, were remorseful to tell me that they had to issue me a citation for failing to yield.

Yup, that basically means they say I was at fault.  The witness at the scene said I didn’t have the turn arrow, and therefore didn’t have the right of way.  That is bullshit.  First, we had the arrow, and second all but one lane of oncoming traffic was at a dead stop — having the red light — all but the one lane where this guy came zooming through.  I intend to fight it, and I need to contact my insurance company to see what help they can offer.  We’ll see what happens.

Any way, there I sat in the ER waiting to get my foot snooped, wondering how the hell Heather was, trying to calm Lady down over the phone.  She held it together quite well, but was really worried about us, namely Heather since I hadn’t any more news of her.  It took about 2 hours to finally get called in and as I’m hobbling my way back to the tiny examining room, I hear my name called out behind me.  There, sitting in a chair with a blanket on her lap is Heather.  No broken spine and her head was still screwed on tight.  She’s done and was about to come and find me.  Relief and joy.

Now it’s my turn.  I could feel my foot swelling at I sat in the ER.  I can walk on it a bit but put no pressure on the toes.  I’m no fool.  This is more than a sprain, but it didn’t feel like a massive break.  So, I get poked, prodded and sent to have x-rays taken.  The x-rays showed a stress fracture in the bone just below my second toe… the "monkey toe" as I call it.  Apparently my legs are strong enough that I can break a bone in my foot by pressing the brake pedal down hard enough.  Go me.  But it was the speed and force of that braking that made the guy hit us on the front bumper rather than a few feet back on the passenger door.  The hospital gave me a very fashionable shoe that makes me walk like Igor.  I get to wear it for a coupla’ weeks.  Oh, and a scrip for painkillers.  Groovy.

Kevin the Mighty came and picked us up at the hospital.  He ran us to the tow-yard where my truck was so I could sign the release for my insurance company to go and get it.  I went to see if I could retrieve any other valuables and my "DmentD" gator plate from the front bumper and found that the other guy’s license plate was still embedded in the wreckage of my car.  Now THAT’s some funny shit.  I did actually manage to get my gator plate, too.  It’s mangled and a fitting memento to remind me to watch my ass on the road.  The rest of the car is, well, a wreck.  The entire front end is smashed in and down, completely pancaked.  Jebus bless Toyota and their engineering team for making it REAL hard to drive the motor backwards into the passenger compartment.

We then went to look at a coupla’ apartments.  Afterwards we went to a very groovy restaurant that I fell in love with named "Freddie’s" in south/central Austin — actually, that’s the area we’re looking to move to.  There we waited for our rescuers, Fiddy and Raul, to come and scoop us up and bring us back to Houston.  They stuck around and ate with us while we sat there trying to convince Fiddy to move to Austin.  I think we’re wearing him down.

So the upshot is this.  My little 4-Runner played chicken with a Ford Expedition and the passenger compartment was still well intact (the front is fucked pretty good, though).  The worst that has come of this is that both Heather and I will be sore-as-hell for a few days and I get to hobble around like a cripple for about two weeks.  Once again, a disaster hits and people are still alive.  The insurance company will cut me a check next week, and my more-than-car-savvy brother who has escaped to Houston with us is going to help me find a new car — likely another 4-Runner — and talk the salesman into either submission or ritual seppuku (those that know David, know that this is not THAT much of an exaggeration).

I have a coupla’ pics of the car on my phone, but no Bluetooth dongle to get them to my computer.  I’ll post them later.

Things just keep getting better and better.