EDITED:
For those of you who were not aware, I had a piece of glass in my ear lobe from the accident. But finally, after a year and a half, it came out. This happened a few weeks ago. I was going to post it on here, but I got so busy with school that I hadnt found the time to do it. Well, now I have because I wrote a paper about it for one of my classes. So read below for the full story, and yes its pretty long. In the picture above, I am holding the piece in my hand. Hopefully you can see it. Its pretty big.
A Season Of Change
There I sat on my knees, with my head lying in her lap, my arms wrapped tightly around her waist. As she is manipulating and squeezing my ear lobe, she suddenly screams, “LOVER!!! I can see it!” I respond in the calmest voice as I could muster, “I know Lover, go ahead.” She tells me to hold on and not to move. She takes the tweezers and begins to work, and I can hear the sound of metal scraping glass. I know that in a few seconds, I will come to grips with a certain reality of the accident, all the while moving past and letting go of another.
A year and a half earlier, I had been driving to Lakeland Regional Medical Center, where I worked as a patient transporter. That day, I had plenty of time to get to work, and so I decided to slow down and actually go the speed limit. Seconds later a car pulled out in front of me. I slammed on my breaks, and started to swerve to avoid hitting him. It was too late. After everything had settled, and I regained my bearings, I quickly realized there was something visibly wrong with my wrist and leg. Also in the process, my elbow had knocked out my windshield and had shattered glass into my face. So there I sat with blood streaming down my face and collecting into a pool in my lap. After a few minutes, an ambulance arrived and I was rushed to the hospital as a trauma alert.
In the Emergency Room, the doctor put my dislocated wrist back in place, and made sure everything else was stable. The doctor told me that I had a broken left radius and a dislocation of that wrist, and that I had broken my right femur in two places. That night, I was taken to surgery to fix my leg. The surgeon did the best he could to piece the bone back together and fortified it with a rod and fixed it in place with screws. A few days later, while lying in my hospital bed, I thought to myself about just how fortunate I was. I came to this conclusion in two ways. First, I realized that I had many friends, many more than I even really realized. This was something that I had taken for granted, and it brought me to tears on many occasions to know that they were there to support me. The other way was by realizing just how close I came to being a whole lot worse off than I was. Working in the hospital, you see and learn lots of things. Just a week prior to my accident, I had taken a 20 year old to the morgue. He had been in an accident and had broken his femur as well. Unfortunately he also severed the femoral artery and died from internal bleeding. I thought to myself how that easily could have been me.
I had many dark days and nights in the weeks and months of recovery that followed. Seven months into my recovery process, I regained the ability to walk. A few months later I started to drive again, and so I started taking myself to counseling to help move past the event. I realized that I had an issue, and it was much more complex than just being nervous to drive. As I dealt with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, things began to get back to normal for me. I started going out with friends, returned to my church and started helping out there, and went back to work. Amidst all this change, I even met a woman who I became romantically interested in. We began talking and having lunch together, and after a few weeks, we began dating. As months passed, we grew closer and began to fall in love. She began to help me considerably during this time. She would love me tenderly at times when I needed it, and in other times, she would be fierce in pushing me to better understand myself. We began calling each other “Lover,” which was a reference to a Saturday Night Live skit that we both thought was hilarious. We use it in all types of conversations with each other, in a casual and affectionate way. Some might find it corny, but to us, it has become a deeper way of letting the other know that they are loved. However, I still often thought to myself, “I’m not the vibrant active guy I used to be. I can’t run. I can’t even walk straight or without a limp. My back hurts every night after I go home from walking uneven all day. There is a lot wrong with me. Why is she with me; what could she possibly see in me?” I began viewing myself as a victim, and that I would be one for as long as I lived. I struggled between seeking affirmation from my Lover and others in one minute, and then doubting that the affirmation I received was even sincere in the next minute. The accident and the recovery were bringing to light my insecurities, many of which I did not want to face. But I became excited to be able to continue in my journey with someone who could love me and see through my insecurities and help me work on them.
Over a year after the accident, I noticed that there was something hard and painful in my ear lobe. After playing around with it, testing to see what hurt and what didn’t hurt, I came to the conclusion that there must be a piece of glass from the accident remaining in my ear. In the coming months I monitored the fragment, and at times, it would break through the skin, bleed and then re-heal itself again. One day, it cut through the skin again, but this time it didn’t heal back up. I knew that, unlike the permanent rod in my leg, it was just a matter of time before the glass would work its way out. But I had come to realize over the few months of dealing with this shard, that this glass meant more to me than just a painful piece of foreign body. And it was more than just a symbol of the accident. It represented something much bigger and was more personal to me than that. To me, the glass had come to represent my life since the accident; a progression of learning who I am, coming to grips with myself and how I function, and also the direction of where I was now headed. I realized that I wasn’t quite ready to part with my friend. I needed to realize where I had been, what had happened and what had changed, and where I was going. Before I let this piece of glass come out of my ear, I had to be ready to move on with my life, and to pursue what was ahead of me.
So there my head lay, in the lap of my Lover, my arms squeezing her waist. I knew that this was much bigger than it seemed to the outside world. I knew that it meant so much more to me, and I knew that Lover knew this as well. I had been very cautious in dealing with my ear. But in that moment sitting there with her, I knew that it was time for the glass to come out. If anyone was going to take out this symbol in my ear, it was going to be the woman who had pushed me forward and had loved me through it. It was going to be her to take it out because she was just as much of a part of that symbol as I was. As she poked and prodded at my ear, I poked and prodded my mind in an attempt to understand what was going on inside it. After a few minutes, I said to myself, “Let her take it out.” My future, I realized, was undefined without her being in it. She had helped me over the months to focus and move forward, and to know myself better. And now it was time to take that next step, and she was going to do it with me. I realized that I no longer needed that symbol in my ear because I was no longer a victim. I was someone who had progressed past that stage of recovery, and I had someone who had seen me and helped me through it; someone who was connected to me and what I went through.
After a few more minutes, she said, “Hold on, don’t move!” I could hear the excitement in her voice, and I could feel the glass start to give way. And in that second it took for the glass to give way and come out, I thought to myself, “This is it, this is where I am now.” And then it was over. That chapter was closed and another was started. I was moving in a new direction with the repercussions of the accident in mind, and she was coming with me.
The feeling I had afterwards was one of blissful contentment. I did not run around shouting and screaming my joy. I did not go and call everyone I knew and tell them of the event. I just got up, went to the sink until the bleeding stopped, and let the full realization of what had just happened set in. A slight smile can upon my face. Lover was looking at the glass in her hand. It was quite a big piece. She cleaned it off and found something safe to put it in. She knew that her Lover would want to keep that as a reminder of what had happened. Not of an accident, quite the contrary. Some would even say an act of God. No, what it represents is an event, a major life change. A series of lessons learned over a season of change. And the thing about seasons is that they keep coming. They do not stop; they persist year after year, life after life, and generation after generation. “Lover, it’s out!” “I know,” I said. And then the next chapter started with a hug. One of promise, and of joy, and of anticipation.
