How an "Accident" Helped Me Find More Meaning by Jennifer Stone

When I was nineteen, something happened to me which made me see the world in a different way.  Up until then, I had never really faced any challenges in my life.   I had good health, I did well in school and I had great friends and family.  In fact, I was with a group of friends when it happened.  We got into a car accident.  Three of my girlfriends and I were on our way to UNH to visit another friend on her birthday.  It was snowing out and the roads were slippery.  We got lost and ended up on a small two lane highway, bickering about which way to go.  I remember looking up and seeing a white car fishtail toward us and then start to spin around and lose control.  It hit us and pushed us backward into a ditch.  I was in the passenger seat and our car was so crushed that the glove compartment was almost in my lap.  I looked down and saw that my leg was broken, no x-ray needed.  

They had to use the jaws of life to get the other girls out of the backseat, but luckily no one's injuries were life threatening.  Everyone had huge scrapes on their chests from the seatbelts.  The EMTs said the seatbelts saved our lives.  Once at the hospital, I was expecting to get put in a florescent colored cast and sent on my way home, but they told me the break was too clean to mend properly without some extra measures.  I had a choice.  They could either put me in a cast that went all the way up to my thigh for six months or they could do surgery to put a rod into the bone and I would only be on crutches for a month.  They said if I chose not to do the surgery, there would be no guarantee that my leg would heal properly and I might end up having it anyway.  I chose the surgery.

Once I got home from the hospital, I was in more pain than I had ever experienced in my life.  I spent a lot of time watching the clock so that I could take my next pain pill. It was depressing just to wake up in the morning and know that I had to spend the next 16 hours lying awake and hurting.  Even after the pain subsided a little and I was able to get around on my crutches, everything was a challenge.  All I wanted was home cooked food, but I couldn’t cook because I needed crutches to stand and they occupied my hands.  Going up and down the stairs at school felt like a death defying feat amongst all the other students rushing to get around me.  I had to get rides everywhere because I couldn’t drive.  I hated having to be dependent on others.

I remember the day the doctor gave me a walking cast and told me I could stop using crutches as one of the happiest days of my life.  It was a sunny spring day and I remember sitting outside on the steps of my house and appreciating the progress I had made. Even though it still hurt, I walked all around the house that day just because I could.  As the months went by, I still had lingering pain in my leg and I walked with a limp.  I met my future husband during this time and I remember trying so desperately to walk through the pain so that he didn’t know I had a limp.  I was so thankful that it wasn’t a permanent condition.

I spent a lot of time wondering why this had happened to me.  I used to think about it every day.  I had a limp for almost a year so it was something that was always with me.  The experience made me a much more introspective person.  I wanted to know what it was I was supposed to learn from this life lesson.  Looking back on it twelve years later, I think that it made me appreciate the plights of others.  I now feel sympathy for handicapped people who go through life facing what I only had to experience for a short amount of time.  I learned that people are out there everyday, facing challenges that I might not even be able to imagine. Being able to walk away from this experience relatively unscathed has convinced me that I have a real purpose in this world, which is why my life was spared when it could so easily have been taken.  It made me appreciate the blessings that I have been given in this life and which I used to take for granted.  Even though it was both physically and emotionally painful for me, I wouldn’t change it because it made me a better person.