I was two weeks from leaving the Rio Grande Valley when I totalled my car.
I don’t remember the actual accident. I don’t remember my airbag bursting from the steering wheel. I don’t remember coming to and unbuckling my seatbelt. I don’t remember trying the door handle. I don’t remember finding the door crunched shut by the force of a 2 ton truck meeting my Honda Civic Coupe. Even though I know none of those things I remember adrenaline-fueled sensation of leaping from the shattered driver’s side window a la the Dukes of Hazzard. Without forewarning, years later, energy skims across the backs of my hands and I hear the sound of safety glass crunching under my feet.
I remember why I burst from the car, thinking “Fire, explosion, the car is going to explode in an enormous, uncontrollable ball of flames.” Obviously, I’ve seen far too many action movies.
No explosion occurred. Instead, I don’t remember my knees buckling. I don’t remember resting in a fire ant nest. I know it happened because two days later the bites would bloom across my body in unholy pus-filled welts. I only begin to remember when cars stopped and people appeared. A kind woman called the police and then handed me her cell phone so that I could call my now-fiance. She comforted me in Spanish, calling me m’ija, just as my grandmother does. EMTs arrived, young men in navy blue uniforms asking me if I’d blacked out and telling me that I should ride with them to the hospital, a mile away.
I respond that I’m not sure my insurance covers ambulance rides and could the cop just give me a ride because I don’t need an actual ambulance. Just a ride. I don’t have any broken bones. I stand, fire ant-bitten. Unaware of pain. I look at my body, dirty and bleeding, I scan my arms and see a lump, a hematoma the size of a grape, and I gently press it, feeling for pain that never comes.
Blood spurts from my arm, hits the paramedic nearest me “Ah,” I think “that’s why they wear dark uniforms.”
They take one look at me and say “Get in the ambulance now. If you have any sort of insurance, it will cover this.” Not saying, but thinking “Crazy, crazy gringa.” And I comply. I climb into the ambulance, lay down on the gurney, wait for them to pull away from the scene of the crime and sigh. During the 2-minute jaunt to the hospital, one paramedic hands me a clipboard holding a sheaf of forms.
“I need you to sign these.”
I started reading them. I read about not holding the EMTs responsible if they happened to cause my death. I read about my responsibility for the cost of the trip if it was not covered by my insurers. I read and read.
“Uh, nobody ever reads those.” the paramedics shrug with concern about my mental well-being.
But I keep reading. I have to read everything that I sign. I read the fine print when I get a credit card or a business checking account. I read leases. I read recipes so that I know which ingredients to purchase and just how my mise en place should be arranged.
When the ambulance drivers deposit me at the Emergency Room, the nurses ask how I am doing and the men in navy blue respond “She’s the first person that ever read the forms.”
Four hours will pass before I am x-rayed, before a visiting doctor from San Antonio snips not-yet-dead skin from my knees, before I am stitched back up, given drugs and released.
