Accident with traffic lights

Another long weekend of fetes, parties, beach limes, family gatherings, prayer meetings and solemn celebrations of Indian arrival looms ahead as Casualty in Port-of-Spain General and San Fernando (among other health facilities) brace for the cases of shootings, stabbings and the inevitable smashed and mangled bodies when drivers “lose control” of motor vehicles. Too often, it isn’t the driver who “lost control,” who is carried into Casualty — or the mortuary — when the car, like a runaway horse, took the metaphorical bit between its teeth to overtake on a blind corner, swerve, skid, jump the median, slam into — or cartwheel to land on top of — another car going in the opposite direction (ie when the driver who “lost control” was speeding/DUI/reckless — and/or a combination of all three). I hope no Newsday reader will go through what I experienced in April 1981 when there was an “outage” in El Socorro that was a contributory factor to, if not the actual cause of, the accident that prompted me to write: “As I left the typewriter to answer the phone I wondered who could be calling me at 10 o’clock in the morning. Was it a friend with a choice bit of gossip? A neighbour or a total stranger begging me to write more about the water situation? Perhaps it was a fellow field naturalist reporting yet another ecological disaster for me to investigate? More likely, a wrong number?

I picked up the phone, “Hello?” I said. Oh, how I hate the way those unknown people who don’t bother to check a number, or made an error in dialling,  slam down the phone without one word of apology when I reply by saying my number. Mind you, in these days Telco may be at fault (it often is) — but at least the caller who interrupted my train of thought at the typewriter, or in the middle of cooking, or half-way through a shower (among other bathroom activities) might have said s/he was sorry. However, this call wasn’t a wrong number.“Mrs Hilton?” inquired a voice I didn’t know. “Yes?” “Hold for a call.” I held, wondering all the while which business, bank or government office needed to talk to me. The call was put through, my caller told me she is the Chief Personnel Officer in the firm where my husband was working. “I don’t want to alarm you . . .” she began after she’d told me who she was. Fortunately, I was sitting down. The next words I remember were “accident, El Socorro Crossing, Port-of-Spain General Hospital.”

Pausing only to shed my shorts and don a pair of long pants, I drove to Port-of-Spain General, all the while thanking God that we lived so near the hospital, praying that my husband wasn’t badly injured, and remembering the “Dial 999” telecast of two evenings before and the warnings about dangerous driving, especially at crossings where the traffic lights aren’t working because of an “outage”. And that my husband is such a careful driver. And how I’ve always hated that highway. From then on there is only a series of impressions . . . Casualty. My husband’s blood-soaked shirt. The drip — TV calls it an IV. The doctors bent over him. The police asking “What is his name? Where does he live?” The nurse directing me to sit in the waiting room — where there was nowhere to sit with my daughter and the gentleman and lady from Personnel who were telling me not to worry about the car or the legal details or anything else except my husband now lying on a trolley waiting for X-ray.”(2003 Even now, remembering that morning, my heart beats faster, my blood pressure rises (?) as I type these words into the computer.) The waiting and the fearing and the hoping as he was wheeled out of X-ray and back into the examining room. The doctor says “This is only a preliminary diagnosis. The surgeons are with him.”

The clerk registering my husband’s formal admission into hospital snaps, “Don’t touch those papers!” when the sympathetic hospital porter was ready to take him up to the ward. And the waiting with my husband, still lying on the trolley in a crowded corridor, six stitches in his head, four, perhaps five broken ribs . . The brown paper under his head bringing home to me the doctors’ and nurses’ protests. . . At last, the walk behind the trolley through the corridors and up in the lift to Ward 24. He lies in the bed, the stained shirt, his trousers and socks partly covered with a sheet. “No, we’re leaving him to rest. We’ll change him as soon as he’s over the worst of the shock.” That makes sense. I stand beside the bed. He opens his eyes. I say “I love you.” There is nothing more I can say. He is alive. By the mercy of God, he is alive.

This is the reality of a traffic accident. This happened to me last week (April 1981). For your own sakes, drive carefully today. For your wife, your children’s, your loved one’s sakes, drive safely today — and every day . . .” For the record, a friend who passed by the scene of the accident, not knowing that John, my husband, was a victim, told us later that he’d said to his fellow passenger, “I’ll bet no one got out of that alive” — for there were two other victims: the driver and passenger of the van that slammed broadside on into John’s car is he crossed that junction from South to North. Tragically, defensive driving is no defence against the drunk driver — or the sober speed fanatic. Take it slow-er, remember the old adage, “better late than never”, stick to fruit punch — or soda and Angostura bitters. Drive as if your life (and the lives of those you love) depended on it this weekend - because it does.