After staying in
New Orleans for a week, I decided to return to
Kansas City. My friend Bella came along, driving his own
Ford Explorer, whilst my friend Jason took the wheel of my
Ford Taurus.
The drive went well. Then, while Westbound on
I70, at 5:00 a.m., Bella fell asleep at the wheel, and we swerved onto the median. He overcorrected, and we went up the side of an overpass, cleared both guardrails, and landed at a 45 degree angle on the other side, putting a 1-foot crater into the Earth.
My face slammed into the "a-frame," that bar where the windshield meets the passenger window. As a result, the bone in my forehead was split in half, my face was crushed inward, the vision in my left eye was destroyed, and the L2
lumbar in my
spinal column was busted.
Jason, seeing it in the rearview mirror of my car, turned around and came back. When he arrived, Bella had gotten out of the Explorer and crossed the interstate to a gas station to call
911. Jason removed my seatbelt, as it appeared to be choking me.
The ambulance arrived and tended to both myself and Bella. They decided to call the
Staff for Life emergency helicopter at the
University of Missouri Health Sciences Center to transport me there.
Once I arrived, a surgery was immediately performed on my forehead. Four more surgeries were to follow whilst I was hospitalized. I do not remember the first three weeks I was there: my brain had swollen considerably, and I was comatose for those three weeks.
The other four surgeries consisted of rebuilding my face, removing two bone flaps from my skull to relieve pressure, and two surgeries to fix my spinal column.
After I was discharged from the hospital, I was taken to the
Rusk Rehabilitation Center, also in
Columbia, Missouri. I was there for another four weeks, and while there, I underwent both
physical and
occupational therapy.
On 29 June, I was discharged and came home home to
Rhineland, Missouri, to finish my recovery here. On 14 August, I will have the bone flaps, which they put into a freezer, put back into my skull.