1984 Nissan 200sx

I had my first car for less than a month. On the night of August 11, 1987 (two months before my 16th birthday), I fell asleep at the wheel. (Yes, I was sober. Not a drop of alcohol; I just got back from a week in Disneyworld, though.) I left my girlfriend's house, which is a 40 minute drive from mine, and got to the last highway before I got home. It's a straight, long, boring 5 miles with only 2 stoplights. I set the cruise control to 50 mph, then apparently nestled in for the night.

If you have a weak stomach, you might just want to leave this page now. Go ahead and hit that back button (don't say I didn't warn you.)

The car hit a storm drain while I was still asleep (therefore I was still going 50 mph), it cocked it airborne, and within 10 feet the car came to an immediate stop, wrapping around (literally) a large telephone pole. The worst, of course, was yet to come and I'm lucky I went into shock. I'll spare you the gory details, but the pole was nice enough to hit perfectly at the driver-side door - crushing me between it and the center console (yes, I was wearing my seatbelt.) They almost released me from the hospital, thinking I only had a hairline fracture in my pelvis. Right before I was discharged, I went to take a leak. Within 10 minutes I was in the O.R. having emergency exploratory surgery. The hairline fracture was more like a crack, and there was enough bone movement that my urethra was separated (they're connected). A broken pelvis bleeds more than other bone fractures (just my luck), which caused heavy internal bleeding in my abdomen. Since my bladder was no longer connected to my urethra, it was floating up my chest on a pool of blood.

It was finally decided that the best treatment was to stop the bleeding, insert a catheter (it could have been worse; this catheter actually came through a hole near my navel instead of the usual entrypoint,) and "sew" me back up (47 staples). They could then let the blood clot dissipate "normally", (they predicted it would take a year), and then my bladder would have settled back down close enough to where it was feasible to connect my urethra back to it. It actually only took 8 months for this process, they hooked me back up. I'm making it sound a lot easier than it was, but there were lots of infections, drug interactions, and above all else pain along the way.

Then there was the time I developed kidney stones - which not only blocked the flow through the catheter, but also jammed the mechanism that releases the catheter so they could exchange it. That was such a traumatic event that they agreed it would be easier to knock me out completely in an O.R. to get my monthly cathether exchange. I was on crutches for the first few months, too. And I was supposed to attend highschool as normally as I could.

It was time for the final re-plumbing operation, but it had only been done 20 times in the history of medicine before. When they rolled me into the O.R. for that last time, there were 20 doctors from all over in the room, apparently there for the "learning experience."

Needless to say, after 3 or 4 years of therapy (and having to go in for a capacity and flow urinalysis weekly), I eventually got back to 100%. Everything eventually worked the way it did before, and this was very much progressively encouraging news for a guy entering his Junior year in high school, as you could imagine. Wasn't that a nice story?