About 25 years ago when I was still in college I thought it would be cool to get a motorcycle. I rode it around for about a year with no problems until one day I was riding down this mountain road near where I lived and a deer ran out in front of my bike and I swerved to avoid it, I flew off my bike and into a ditch on the side of the road and was knocked out, my bike fell off the other side of the road and down a sheer cliff face. It was not obvious anyone has ever been there or that there was an accident. I laid there for almost a two days until people started looking for me after missing work. When I came to my legs were messed up, I had broken an ankle, elbow and wrist and couldn’t move. I sat there for hours convinced I was going to die. I was pretty upset about it but after a while the anxiety washed away and I just went completely numb. My next memory was waking up in a hospital.
Thank god I was wearing a helmet.
How about you?
Does it count if I don’t really remember it? I was 8. It was a week before summer break. I was waiting for my mother to come home from work (sitting on the front steps to our house). A friend of mine called me across the street. I went. I didn’t make it to the other side. Hit and run driver crashed right into me, dragged me half a block and left me for dead. Neighbors said he didn’t even look back. They never caught him. I remember waking up in the ambulance. I had a head wound and a broken leg (compound fracture, pierced the skin). I remember them having to set the bone and then take me to another hospital (a children’s hospital). I remember being drugged. And waking up to my mom sleeping in the chair next to me. I have no memory of anything from the time I was crossing the street to the time I was in the ICU at the first hospital. They wouldn’t let me move my head. I don’t remember being scared or in pain or anything until they had to set the bone to straighten out my leg to splint it.
Even the aftermath (10 weeks in a body cast that went from my breast bone down to cover everything but the toes of my broken leg) is kind of a hazy mess. Except that I then fell down the stairs and broke my arm too. Added insult to injury.
Kids are weirdly resilient. It sounds like you should have deep scars across your body, but I know for a fact that they all probably faded in a year or two. Damn kids with their super powers.
I still have the scar from the head wound but you can only see it in winter time when I’m paler, and it’s sort of receded some into my hair line. Even then. It’s very faint. I don’t have any scars on the leg (that I can see anyway) Or my back. It’s the kind of thing that didn’t seem scary or worry me at the time, but looking back I know I could have died. I think I don’t remember a lot of things because I was on painkillers for a good majority of the time.
Of course the other thing is that I have to go off the accounts of people who were there at the time and they were mostly kids (and one person’s mom who couldn’t give the cops a good description of the guy or the car or anything).