Buckle up for safety

Yeah, yeah, I know I should have buckled my seat belt before I started the car. But, I was doing the lunch time dash so I was halfway out the drive when I realized I hadn’t clicked the shoulder and lap strap into place.
As I reached for it I rationalized, “I haven’t left the parking lot, yet.” However, from the school of hard knocks, I know the human body is quite fragile at even the slowest rates.
My dad spent his last 15 years of employment as a professional truck driver. When he lived in New York he kept the store shelves in the northeast well stocked. In the southwestern states of New Mexico and Arizona, he drove over mountains and through deserts filling up gas stations. Aware of the size and stopping rate of his semi-truck, he was a boringly slow, careful driver.
Each trip began with a routine stop at the dispatch office. He picked up his assignment and paper work, drove his car over to his truck, parked beside the cab and transferred his suitcase, maps and cassette tapes into the semi-truck before leaving for another week.
It was all very routine, until the day he had a freak accident. It changed his life forever.
Dad had picked up the requisite paperwork. The dispatcher heard the sound of metal thudding against the concrete of a light in the parking lot. He went out to Dad’s car to see what happened.
He found Dad sitting very still behind the steering wheel, his freshly dented bumper, resting against the parking light pole. “Are you OK?”
“Help me open this door so I can get out of here,” Dad said. The door was fine. He was not. His hand would not move to grab the door handle.
The dispatcher looked at him thoughtfully, “You better just sit tight and wait for an ambulance.”
Good advice. At parking lot speed, without a safety belt (Who wears a seat belt to drive a few feet across the parking lot?) a whiplash injury had damaged his spinal column. The swelling in the spine caused temporary paralysis and some permanent changes in his nerve system.
My mother was called to the emergency room. She began filling out his paperwork, “Whose insurance should I list? The company or ours? He was driving our car, but he was at the terminal unloading his gear for another trip.”
The only answer from the financial officer was a repitional, “get an attorney.”
There were no clear cut answers to that question. My parents needed lots of time and legal help sorting it all out.
Thanks to the dispatcher’s precaution against moving Dad, he recovered without paralysis, but his body changed. One doctor attributed the extent of his injury to the small size of Dad’s neck bone structure.
That was the only justification offered for a slow speed collision, without a safety belt, causing such a trauma. Even with re-habilitation Dad could not return to trucking.
Since I do not know what kind of bone structure I have, I intend to buckle my seat belt before I ever start a car. I really do, but sometimes I get in a rush and forget that fastened seat belts not only save lives they also reduce injuries.


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