#we’re fine everyone’s fine the other person’s insurance is allegedly going to pay for it

[danothan]

i keep wondering why my schedule has been so wonky lately as if i didn’t quite literally get into a car crash less than a week ago

[vt-scribbles]

The Accident

So now that everything SEEMS to be stable, I can finally come out and talk about what happened. Partially I’m writing this to be documented, but I’m mostly writing this to let you all know what’s going on and what happened. [Under the Readmore, some graphic medical imagery [non-gore/blood], you have been warned.]

Yesterday [January 5th, 2017, around 4 PM], my three sisters and I were having a nice afternoon out. We’d picked them up from school, gone out to eat, and then went to the pet store. After that, we were headed for Payless to go get my sisters some nice shoes for their roadtrip this weekend. My oldest younger sister was driving, the other two were in the back. I was in the passenger’s seat.

So we go to leave the shopping center where the pet store was. We were parked at a stop sign, waiting for traffic to let up so we could turn right. Then, out of no-where, a white Forerunner van [We were in a 2002 CRV] comes barreling towards us at 60 miles per hour with its front windshield containing a stop-sign-sized hole in its half-shattered windshield. We had no time to move; there was only about 1 second between when we saw the car, and when we noticed it turning towards us.

The vehicle struck us in the front-corner/side and completely dented in my sister’s driver-seat door. It struck us so hard that we hopped the curb, and turned a full 90 degrees to the right, damaging a small tree in our wake. Our airbags didn’t deploy. The only thing I could think of once I realized I was conscious and didn’t appear to be in too much pain was to make sure everyone was alive and uninjured. The driver said she couldn’t move her legs, and the sister in the back left said her neck was numb. Everyone was freaking out, but I managed to stay calm and keep them as steady as I could while checking for injuries and mental cognizance. [I’m, fortunately, the type of person who goes placidly calm in the moment but then freaks out later; while everyone else in my family is the opposite, aside from perhaps my dad.] I called 911 within the first minute of the accident, and my middle younger sister got my mother on the phone. No sign of the driver; I wasn’t looking at her car. Witnesses started to gather at this point. Lots of them. At least 5-6 people approached the car. I wasn’t sure if any of them were the driver or not. I turned back to my sisters and asked them if they were able to move their toes and feel their legs. After a bit of calming, they all reported that they were indeed able to feel their feet and wiggle their toes. I asked them to recite their names and ages, and count from 1-10 and then do it backwards, slowly.

I managed to step out of the car and kept tending to my sisters once 911 hung up. I then, with 5% battery, told all of my closest friends what happened, assuring them that everyone was alive, and that I’d update them as things happened. This is where things get a bit strange, because from this moment on until 11pm that night, time had no meaning to me. According to my sisters, time seemed to move in slow motion for them, while for me, everything was sped up. it felt as though the paramedics, the police, and my parents all arrived in 3-5 minutes. Apparently, it was closer to 20. I merely kept my sisters calm and tried to check them over for injuries for 15-20 minutes, unbeknownst to myself. The first to arrive, I believe, were the firemen who pried the car’s left side open. The paramedics arrived shortly after, I believe. The next few minutes were a mix of me trying to calm my sisters and keep them steady while answering questions from the paramedics and firemen.

At this point, I backed away from the seat I was in and started paying some attention around the car. There were witnesses here and there all staring, some were collecting to watch. A few tried to tell me to sit down, but I refused and kept fretting over my sisters. I looked over when I heard a commotion to my left, behind our car. A police van was parked behind us, in front of an ambulance. A cop rushed over, yelling at someone in the back seat to stop kicking the window. He opened the door, and a very, VERY drunk woman sat up and started backtalking him. He closed the door back on her after demanding that she stop. She continued kicking the door and window.

The next thing I know, my parents are there and rushed towards the car, so that was all I saw of this woman. I assumed they’d rushed over here from a different arrest. My mother recently had a lipoma surgery [removal of a benign fatty tumor] in her leg, and ruptured the suture by running to the car. It suddenly began leaking a large amount of semi-clear fluids, which I saw wasn’t blood, but my sisters didn’t see anything but her suddenly-soaked pantleg, which panicked them. I went about assuring them that it was just discharge and she was alright. [The horrible horrible irony was, this was the one positive thing to come out of this mess. My mother had literally, 30 minutes ago, been told by her doctor that her incision was not infected and it was healing normally despite all her pain she’d been complaining about. It turns out, her wound was abscessed/very, very infected. It was, according to the emergency room workers and our family nurse, so bad that if she hadn’t ruptured and drained it involuntarily, it would have gone septic, and she could have lost her entire leg.]

So then the next twenty minutes [which again, felt like 5-10], were a flurry of jotting down information, getting police reports, getting vital signs, loading people into ambulances, and keeping not only my sisters, but my parents calm.

Once everyone’s vitals came back as stable and my three sisters had neck braces, we loaded up into the ambulances on or off of gurneys. I told them I’d deal without a neck brace and without needing an ambulance, they needed it far more. The only damage I seemed to have was a severe seatbelt burn across the top of my chest and shoulder. The driver [my oldest younger sister] went first in her own, and my two youngest sisters were in the other. I rode in the front of the second ambulance. We rode over to the hospital, which was apparently a 20 minute drive, which, again, felt like about 5-10 minutes. I was nauseated the entire drive, and my knee started to ache.

Once we arrived at the hospital, they loaded me up into a wheelchair because of my knee, and my dad wheeled me into the front checkout lobby since I wasn’t an emergency patient. Eventually we got me in, and the first person I talked to was the officer in charge of the investigation. I cannot share any information traded with him. Though, I can share, that I found out that the woman who was trying to kick out the police car window, was the driver. She was extremely intoxicated, had alcohol in the car with her, and had already allegedly driven through a stop sign, hit someone else, and only stopped when she hit us. What a lovely piece of work. [//please note the dripping sarcasm//]

I was eventually, through a bunch of trading, put in a room. The next five hours, which felt like 1, consisted of xrays, questions, police interviews, insurance paperwork, and asking for updates on my sisters and mother. My leg did worsen through the evening, but my xrays all came back fine. My sisters’ did as well. I didn’t get to see any of them, unfortunately, from 5-10:30. [Apparently they tried multiple times to slip out of their room and come see me... on the other side of the hospital.]

Eventually, we were all discharged. I wasn’t given anything for pain, to my disappointment, and I didn’t receive anything for my severe seatbelt burn. However, I’m holding up alright today. Lots of pain, lots of bruising, and the burn is scabbing over. [All 20+ cm of it, not including anything past the chest] We all seem stable, and now we’re just keeping an eye on conditions and calls from police and the hospital.

If you take anything away from this, let it be this.

1) Please keep my family in your thoughts, as this is going to be very hard for all of us to get over mentally. The youngest in the car was 14, and the worst part of it is we all saw it coming, but had no time to react. We all keep replaying it in our heads, and it’s near impossible to stop. This is going to take a long time to recover from emotionally, and mentally.

2) Wear. Your. Seat. Belts.

Wear.

Your.

Seat.

Belts.

Yes, I am going to preach that and repeat it over and over again. Let me get this through to you.

I would very likely be dead if I hadn’t worn my seatbelt.

I would. Be dead. If I hadn’t worn. My seatbelt.

And by the damage, it’s likely my sisters would all be severely injured or worse if they hadn’t worn theirs. The driver especially. She and I likely wouldn’t be alive anymore. You may think it’s stupid or inconvenient. But it takes 1 second to completely change or destroy your life. Wear. It. It takes two seconds to put on. WEAR. IT.

3) Do not drive under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Do not drive under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Do not. Drive. Under the influence of drugs. Or alcohol.

You can and very likely will kill someone or yourself.

You can and likely will hit some innocent, unsuspecting people and could kill. Them.

If you are drunk or otherwise impaired by substance, I do. not. fucking. care. where you need to be. You pull over and you sober up. You call an Uber or another taxi, you call family, you do something besides drive. This woman was pulled over for running //through// a stop sign. She then hit someone else before eventually being forced to stop by hitting us. If she had been going any faster, two of us in that car could have easily died.

That was, no exaggeration, the most terrifying, cold moment of my entire life. In the instant we saw that car turning towards us, we all thought we were going to die. We were out having a nice sibling’s afternoon on the town, chatting and being happy... and then that happened. We were suddenly faced with possible death.

And we were helpless.

I am a forgiving person. I am a kind person. It takes a lot to make me /hate/ you. But what that woman did was unforgivable. It was completely, 100% avoidable. She could have stopped. It could have been easy. But she just kept going, drunk out of her mind.

This has been... a very haunting and traumatic experience for us all. We’re still recovering, and this mess has only just begun, legally. It’s going to be a rough journey, and I can only hope that a month or so from now, we can put this behind us.

We’re alive. We’re not paralyzed, and we were able to walk away from the accident. Not everyone is so lucky. But that doesn’t change the fact that it was terrifying, it was traumatic, and we’re all hurting.

Thank you, everyone, for your good thoughts and concern. It’s really warmed our hearts to see how much you care.

Here’s to another day. <3

[jerepars]

Pistol Extended Story Notes

1/1 We’ve got our riot gear on but we just want to have fun 

Hyperlinks appear in blue (underlined on mobile and the dashboard). The story is posted here. 

James knew his daughter, knew she had her mother’s advice and father’s attention to detail. He and Teresa had taught Samantha well not to talk to strangers or get in the car with anyone who wasn’t them. But regardless, every afternoon he was there, waiting in the kindergarten pickup line. According to the parents of the other kids in Samantha’s class, the pickup system contributed to a safe, healthy learning environment. James didn’t know if he believed that or if it was a bunch of bullshit rich people told themselves to sleep better at night. And the jury was still out on whether James thought it was best to raise a kid in such a bubble of an environment, or if he thought it would serve Samantha well to learn some of the harsh realities of the world at a young age so they couldn’t break her heart later.

The first sentence in the paragraph is a reference to “Lines” by Said the Whale: Seems frightful, but it’s hardly the case. I’ve got my mother’s advice and my father’s attention to every little detail.

To know James was to know he’d do anything to make Samantha smile and hearing her giggle was one of his favorite sounds in the entire world. He was practically giddy recounting the way Samantha had been that afternoon, and James was not a giddy person.

Totally does not work in the context and subject matter of this fic, but I listened to “Make You Smile” by +44 a bunch while writing this pretty much just because of the line If I could, I’d only want to make you smile.

“So what does this have to do with her riding lesson?” Teresa crossed her arms over her chest. “Did you decide to blow it off and just drive around because Sammy was laughing?”

“What? No. I told you, we were late, but we made it eventually, and it all worked out,” James countered. “I’m saying Sammy loved going fast in my car. She was thrilled. Now, the cop who pulled me over for speeding…not so much.”

The working title for this story was Fast in My Car, after the Paramore song of the same name. The beginning of the chorus goes: We’re driving fast in my car. We’ve got our riot gear on but we just want to have fun.

The lines of dialogue quoted above are basically the premise of the story summed up, haha. I wanted to write a cute little fluff fic where James has to tell Teresa he got a speeding ticket. And he was speeding more because Sammy was smiling and giggling rather than they were going to be late. Don’t ask me why these are the weird ass ideas I have. I don’t know why either.

“I’ll pay the fine and do the day of traffic school to keep the point off my license,” James shrugged, nonchalant. “Not a big deal.”

“Not a big deal?” Teresa seethed. “It’s not about the money, James. You got pulled over! With Sammy in the backseat!”

“As if I’m the first,” James pointed out.

Teresa had been pulled over and cited when Samantha was a baby. The cops in their neighborhood were always on the prowl near the end of the month, to meet ticketing quotas. Teresa had learned that the hard way, getting a citation for failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign. A California roll, as it was known locally.

In California, (where the Autrys allegedly live) if you get a moving violation, you can go to traffic school to “hide” a point on your license, which keeps your insurance cost from going up.

A California roll as described here is not sushi, but rather a rolling stop, where a driver “rolls” through a stop sign slowly but doesn’t make a complete stop.

The look Teresa gave James for bringing it up reminded him his wife was a pistol, and she’d shoot him straight and true with her gunpowder glare.

The title of the story comes from Dustin Kensrue’s “Pistol”. 

Who names their fluff fic after a gun? Apparently me.

Of everyone in their family, Samantha had the most effective puppy eyes. James always caved to them, and because of the running gag between Teresa and James that Sammy clearly favored James as a parent, James made empty threats to weaponize Samantha’s puppy eyes against Teresa. He would never make good on those threats—he would never manipulate Samantha that way—but Teresa had no doubt she would fall for whatever James recruited Samantha to do, if ever.

I told @biocoffeebean that this is a fluff fic about the Autrys and how cute Sammy is...except Sammy doesn’t even have any speaking lines in it (sidenote: she has plenty--and I do mean plenty--in Plant Sugar). So @biocoffeebean then said Sammy’s cute puppy eyes might be of use when James has to tell Teresa about the ticket. It was impossible, because I knew Sammy was going to be asleep for this entire thing, but I thought James threatening to use Sammy’s puppy eyes was worth including! 🤗

“I did not get a traffic fine,” Teresa boasted. “I had a meeting over in Gilroy. I went to the farmers market after. I got that garlic rub you like. For the steaks.”

Gilroy, CA’s claim to fame is being the garlic capital of the world. It would be about a 45-minute drive from where the Autrys live. Since James will never ever get his steak in canon, I have to find every opportunity to bring it up.

“But James,” Teresa spoke in the dark, “don’t even think about taking Sammy or the baby to the Go Kart track, okay? I don’t want our kids picking up your driving style.”

‘Our kids’ was all James heard.

A few months ago, when I first came up with this idea, @la-ermitana said something like the point “Don’t drive like daddy!” needed to be enforced but James would try and take Sammy Go Kart-ing anyway, lol. So I had to include it somehow!

[anthonybialy]

Dissent Denied

Tolerance is fine up until someone thinks differently. The audacity of dissent cannot be permitted if we're all to get along. The purportedly open-minded justify excluding anyone contrarian by proclaiming those mean jerks don't accept others. It's the closest they come to cleverness. Anyone to the Shining Path's right is a transphobic Hitler who doesn't reuse plastic bags.

You only care if you agree with sticking everyone in the care of our compassionate and efficient capital. If you noticed such purported assistance fails every damn time it tries, you're one of the haters. It's too bad every alternative lacks compassion, but that sure is uncanny.

Vague rumors about some menacing Constitution that encourages us to fix it ourselves must be squashed. Unity is the only way to perfect progress. Alternately, the millionth catastrophic failure will prompt anyone paying attention to doubt the salubrious effects of elected messianic dolts deciding what's best for us. Their preposterous schemes are against the rules, but at least they're harmful.

It's strange that a political party would favor dead babies. Take the smirking idiocy embodied by claiming conservatives are pro-life until a baby is born. Why are you not paying to raise another family's child?

You don’t back lousy addictive welfare state handouts which keep families impoverished, which means you want ragamuffins to suffer. The welfare state is the only way to help, according to humans who prefer to think free will doesn't exist.

How many unwanted babies have you taken in, hypocrite? Forget how those actually squeezing out brats should be the ones who accept responsibility. Handouts treat adults with infants like infants. Those favoring responsibility don't have to fix the world's problems. In fact, they think you're capable. Or, you must arrest felons personally to be anti-crime.

You have some nerve opposing a lifetime on the dole for babies who were never aborted. The horrors of a life where you have to be responsible enough to raise a child just because you had one are too much to bear. Who wants to bring a kid into a world where he'll have to grow up?

Why you want sick people to go without insurance is something you'll have to explain to Satan. There's no other way to acquire health care, even through selling your soul. The government that brought Medicare into existence is sure to get a good deal from Lucifer.

It's not like there's an eternal record of federal agencies being rotten at caring for people. Getting your own things means decent choices at better prices. The lack of a worthless promise is a feature of not allegedly having coverage for all.

Buying a commodity from businesses competing for you makes it affordable to the point where there's enough left over to donate to those commercials for hospitals helping sick kids that almost make you cry in front of your fantasy football league. But don't bills get expensive? And helping others voluntarily will never happen, claim those who never do so.

I hope we can be cured by promises. It's mean and scary to make people care for themselves according to people who really get how reality works. Guaranteeing makes it worse. That itself is the only valid guarantee. It's like these marks have never dealt with mattress salesmen before. The inability to turn down Washington's services is surely a sign customers would patronize on their own.

Alcoholics who drink beer need gin to be cured. Mandates ruin everything, which must in turn be fixed with legislative do-overs. The government incentivizes getting insurance through work, which means customers don't see prices. We better socialize to compensate. And subsidies and grants made tuition skyrocket, so it's time to excuse student debt. Students learned quite a bit about consequences while earning 120 credits.

Next, Social Security bankrupts the nation in so geezers can get pittances in exchange for fortunes paid in, which will be covered by those evil Wall Street goons. Emmanuel Goldstein is a broker.

I'm sure not tired of being lectured about not caring as if the left's way is the only path to compassion. There will be no alternatives suggested in that famous open-minded way only the sympathetic can manage.

You will be cancelled if you note how many programs designed to repair a fractured world take a drill to tectonic plates. Observers can see monumental governmental failures happening in real time, and yet those who profess allegiance to science refuse to note the results of experiments.

Why did you ruin government perfection by preventing proper funding? The next trillion would've brought us joyous peace. We always need to try spending more, which is a remarkably convenient excuse. Napalm will only extinguish blazes if you use enough of it.

Increasingly ridiculous excuses for ceaseless failure are offered by those who also think anyone for trusting markets is a soulless demon. Don't screw up everything if you're accusing everyone else of screwing up.