Expect the Unexpected

A lot of lives changed on the day of the accident. Every hour or so after I woke up on November 13th, 2023, a new wave of people heard the news about the car wreck that my boyfriend and his brother had been in. People I haven’t spoken to in months or years would reach out to me asking if he was okay, but I knew about as much as they did. I woke up that morning to a stream of texts from his phone, the first of which read “Crash Detected SOS. Derek called emergency services from this approximate location after iPhone detected a crash. You’re receiving this message because Derek has listed you as an emergency contact,” with an attachment of the location of the crash. I was shocked, as I did not expect to wake up to this one Monday morning. Every time the location of his phone moved, I would receive a new text with his new approximate location which eventually ended up being a hospital near my house in Louisiana. However, I was not at my house when I received this text. I was in my college dorm at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, 535 miles away from home. As the lazy college student that I have become, by the time I had woken up, he had already been at the hospital for a few hours. I called his phone, but no answer. I called his mother, and she answered, but she said she would call me back when she could talk. All I knew was that he was in very bad shape, and that he was not wearing a seatbelt when the accident happened. It was a week before Thanksgiving break, so I figured I could do a week of school at home. I knew I needed to pack my things for the next two weeks and go home to be by his side. I had a nine-hour drive ahead of me, but that seemed like nothing if I could get home to see him. The first thing I did when I got into my car was put on my seatbelt.

I knew that Douglas was an aggressive driver. He was in a rush on the road, and had even been in a couple of minor car accidents before. However, he seemed to know how to drive his truck well and never got in an accident with me in the car. I learned to slow down in the car and take my time when I’m driving, but I went through a phase of wanting to drive fast as well. A large number of wrecks that occur today could be avoided if young drivers just learned to slow down on the road.

By the time I got home and to the hospital, it was about 9 pm. They took me in to see him, and I was scared. I was told that he punctured both of his lungs and broke his back, five ribs, his collarbone, and a few bones in his face. He also has some brain damage. However, once I saw him, he didn’t look quite as bad as I thought he would. He had a very swollen and bruised face, scratches all over him, and a ventilator tube down his throat, but he still looked like himself. He was heavily sedated, but I was able to talk to him and occasionally feel his dirty and damaged hands squeeze mine.

He woke up a few days later in a lot of pain, eager to get out of all the medical equipment and very confused as to why he was there. Although he had a tube between his vocal chords and couldn’t speak, he could still mouth words. I barely understood anything he said, but I did see him say “I love you” and “what happened?” I asked him while he was awake if he heard everything I said while he was sleeping, and he nodded yes. While the doctors were attempting to take his ventilator off, his oxygen dropped to 20%, and he turned white as a sheet. This is when they induced his coma. They were not able to take out the ventilator. I had such high hopes of him getting off of the ventilator that day, but as I had been telling myself, it is important to expect the unexpected.

Four days into his induced coma, we celebrated our one year anniversary. A special day that he planned with dinner reservations had become a day in the ICU, where all I could do was whisper “happy anniversary” into his ear just in case he could hear me. A day that he was supposed to spend with his family, Thanksgiving, had become an extremely stressful day for his parents and brother. I never got to hear him speak before I had to go back to school.

With me going away to college and him being so focused on school and work, he was already having a hard time senior year. When he wakes up, he will learn of the hundreds of people who came to pray for him at multiple prayer services, the bracelets that were made to encourage prayers which everyone wears and gives to their family to wear, and the love that has always been there for him that he just hadn’t discovered.

The Universe has ways of telling people things, but sometimes they are too stubborn to see it. Derek is a very driven person and looks far into the future. He is a senior in high school in a long distance relationship, and he was working four days a week at a restaurant before the accident to be able to afford to either come see me or help me come home. I love how driven he is and that we get to see each other so often, but I also knew that Derek needed a break. He worked so hard, and this accident seems to be the Universe’s way of telling him to slow down. In fact, the reason the accident happened is because he was trying to go too fast around another car. The Universe can be harsh and ironic. The minor accidents that I mentioned happened before this accident weren’t enough to get him to slow down, and he eventually crashed with full force.

As I mentioned in the beginning, Derek was not wearing a seatbelt when they crashed. He flew through the windshield and landed ninety feet from the car in a ditch. His brother, however, was wearing his seatbelt and only suffered a concussion and a broken bone in his face. He went back to school after Thanksgiving break. To those who are learning to drive or have yet to have a traumatic accident, please take this as evidence that those signs that read “Fasten Your Seatbelts! Someone Needs You!” are very true. Drivers Education so heavily enforces seatbelts, not because they want to make up rules, but because it has proven over and over again to save lives. It is a miracle that Derek is still here, and I am so happy that he is okay. However, a seatbelt could have prevented the ICU visit and the two-week long coma. Someone out there cares, and nobody ever thinks an accident like this will happen to them or someone they love until it does. And then, it is too late to listen to the signs.