Time Marches On
I gotta say, I’m a little bid sad I didn’t make the time to come here and write something on the 10th Anniversary of this diary. That was back on May 1st, by the way. Only managed to overshoot it by about, oh, 2 months. I haven’t been very active (UNDERSTATEMENT!) in this diary for the past few years, having only made 9 entries since November 2007. I even reached a point that was, quite frankly, a perfectly logical place to completely shut this thing down (seen in the 4/4/08 entry A Fitting End). But I can just never fully stay away in permanent. This place is just far too goddamn important to me. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand fucking times: as much as I may enjoy my life at any given point, I can never fully outrun the past. And this diary is my past. So much of it, anyway. The best and worst times of my life are chronicled here, more or less. And so this thing is, as a former flame once titled their diary here, My Key to Not Forgetting.
That aside…. Since I last left you, shit has happened. Maybe not necessarily tons of it, but definitely big pieces of it. It’s been quite the 7 months. Let us begin momentarily. First…….
Now Playing in Dave’s Mental Jukebox: "Swallow" by Emilie Autumn, "Wicked World" by Cold (can’t wait for the new album!), and "Dear Agony" by Breaking Benjamin.
The first bit of business to get to is by far the biggest. On Christmas night this past December, my wife and I got into a bad car accident on our way home from her mother’s house in Memphis. It’s about a 3 hour drive from Memphis to Gallatin, and we’d made it about a third of the way (just on the east side of Jackson, TN) when Heather lost control of the Ford Explorer on the ice (we’d foolishly decided to come back, even though it’d been snowing for a couple of hours….but, honest to God, we hadn’t seen shit on the roads the whole first hour….we literally slid out of control on the FIRST patch of ice we saw). We ended up crossing the median of I-40 at about 65 MPH and slammed into the side of the trailer of an 18-Wheeler. For the last second or two before we hit it, I thought for sure we were fucking dead. If we’d been in my car (a Kia Rio-5 hatchback) we absolutely would’ve been dead. Decapitated, probably. But, thankfully (believe it or not) we caught some air coming off the median so we hit high enough up on the trailer that it didn’t kill us. In fact, I walked away from it all but completely unhurt (a couple of gnarly bruises notwithstanding). Our dog (who got loose and ran off in the chaos, but was found not even a mile away from the crash-site on the other side of the interstate 6 hours later by Heather’s brother and I) was also fine aside from a scratch on her head that likely came more from the running she did after getting loose. Heather wasn’t quite as lucky. Her side of the front end took the brunt of the blow, and shoved some of the engine block back towards the cabin. As she tried to get out of the car in a panic (she thought it was on fire), she went down to the ground on her first step. I flagged down the next incoming car (thankfully, another semi, so they were able to effectively block traffic for us) and set about trying to both figure out what was wrong with Heather and find the dog, all without my glasses (which were never found). Heather’s right knee felt crushed. And the dog was nowhere to be found at the time (though, again, we did miraculously find her again later). Heather angrily implored me to stay behind and look for the dog while instead of riding in the ambulance with her to go to the hospital. I refused. No fucking way I’m letting my wife go to a hospital with undisclosed injuries without me (not to mention that the state trooper told me he couldn’t allow me to stay there). Heather’s injury ended up being a broken right kneecap, in addition to tendon/ligament damage. The next morning, she had surgery to repair the damage. We ended up spending about 2 or 3 days (it’s REALLY hard to remember….they kinda ran together at a certain point) in the hospital in Jackson before my mom brought us back home. Heather’s mom had gone to get the rest of our stuff out of the Explorer, and took a few pictures of it, and goddamn was it a wreck. Like, the front end was completely crushed. The driver’s side wheel had completely come off. It was brutal.
Heather ended up having to wear an absolutely giant knee brace for about three months and was on crutches for about 6-8 weeks….again, I forget because a lot of this time ran together for me. She was out of work for 4 months. I missed two weeks, and parts of the third. For those first two weeks, she was basically immobile on her own. The first week she was stuck in the bed and couldn’t down off of it without me lifting her leg off of it for her. I had to sleep on a futon mattress for those first couple weeks, because we were afraid I’d bump the leg in my sleep. It was a full week before she would even take off the brace and remove the surgical dressing. She has (and will always have) a pretty wicked 6 inch scar running down the front of her right knee. But for those 3-4 months, I basically had to do everything for her. After going through several doctor visits and quite a lot of physical therapy, she finally got back to a point where she could walk without a brace, go back to work, and drive again.
Then, just as life was getting back to normal, the next bombshell came, but in the form of good news…….Heather got pregnant.
Now, this was a planned pregnancy, but only we only agreed to try and get pregnant after much back and forth wrangling and much debate. My main concern was two fold: First was the idea of her being pregnant on a semi-wonky leg…a legitimate concern that she didn’t share; Secondly, I was quite frankly exhausted from having waited on her hand and foot for 4 months and wanted a break before I had to do it again during her pregnancy. Fuck yeah, this was selfish, but I felt I’d earned it. She got EXTREMELY pissed off at me for that second one for a couple of days. But, again, after more debate, we decided the time was right. At this point, she’s about 10 or 11 weeks along. After the first couple of weeks, she broke down and told me that I’d been right…..that we should’ve waited longer. For one of the few times in my life, there was absolutely no gratification in being correct. Kinda too late for that regret.
We have names picked out already (Conner for a boy, Aurora for a girl). This coming weekend will actually be when we first tell any of our parents. Her mom will get to hear it first, then, the following weekend, my parents will get to hear it. None of ’em even have an inkling right now, so it’ll be great.
In between all of this, we’ve lost a couple members of Heather’s family. Her dad
passed away in California in February. We went to the funeral, which meant getting Heather and her still very injured leg on an airplane across the country twice in a 4 day span. We actually purchased an extra seat so she could elevate her leg across two seats and on my lap. And, quite frankly, Southwest Airlines, the staff at LAX, and the staff at Nashville International Airport treated us unspeakably well. It was an experience that could’ve been just terrible, but went as well as it could. Then, just a few weeks ago, Heather’s grandmother died also out in California. Because we were so early in the pregnancy at the time, we didn’t feel comfortable flying out for the funeral. It was even worse because Heather couldn’t tell anyone the real reason we were going, because she didn’t want anyone to find it out that way.
And, that pretty much brings everything up to now. Perhaps I’ll return soon to dive into much more mundane and nerdy subjects, like the DC (Not a) Reboot, summer movies, how much I absolutely LOVE Emilie Autumn, or some such other shit.
Until the next time, here’s to another 10 years!
Sayonara.