Eli’s crash

The message waiting for me at 4 a.m. had been sent two hours earlier, “Eli was in an accident with a drunk driver going the wrong way down the divided four lane. We are at the hospital.” By then they had returned home to sleep. Eli recalled what happened around 10:30 that night near the end of his two hour drive home.“I remember driving and listening to music. I am 99 percent sure the other car did not have its lights on. I could have sworn I never saw it coming. I heard a super loud noise coming out of nowhere, and I was spinning. I wondered,’What is going on?’ then it clicked, ‘I am in a car crash, and I am spinning.’“The airbag kind of knocked me out. It felt like a cinder block hitting my face. I always thought they were like a soft bubble. I tried to take control, to correct. I was spinning. I thought, ‘Oh my gosh I am going to die.’ Then I just hoped to stop and not hit another car or worse. Over the airbag I barely saw a tree and thought, ‘Please hit that, please that.’“Then all these things were beeping. The music shut off. It was quiet. It was steaming. My door was crushed. It did not open. I crawled over to the passenger door. I tried opening it over and over. It kept closing and clicking shut. I thought I was going to die. I crashed into the door, and it opened. I got out, grabbed my phone, took four steps and then fell over.“Two guys came running. They had witnessed the crash. I tried to stand up. I couldn’t. My leg looked inflated. It was bleeding because of the glass. “I asked one of the guys, Caleb, ‘Was it my fault?’ “He said, ‘No. No. It wasn’t your fault! We saw what happened. It was head-on. No dude, not your fault. He was flying. He hit you head-on.’”He saw my leg and held it up so the blood would not rush to it. “I was so dazed. I grabbed onto the guys and said, ‘I thought I was going to die.’ I was freaking out, holding his hand,” Eli recalled. Caleb kept telling him, “You are okay. You are okay, just breathe.”“We need to call the ambulance. We need to call your parents,” they said. Eli called. “Mom, I’m here. I’m fine. I am okay.” She said, “Okay, we are coming.” All through the 10-15 minutes it took to get there, she could hear Caleb repeating to Eli, “You are okay. Just breathe.”The sheriff and state troopers arrived. “They were shining a light in my face. And said, ‘He’s okay. There is an ambulance coming.’” He heard later that the other guy was taken to jail.”The ambulance guys put me on the stretcher and took me to hospital.”One of the guys with the ambulance said, “If it had been a foot to the left, you would have been dead.””It struck me, I almost died.”“The adrenaline was wearing off. I remember crying.”At the hospital he waited in the hall of the ER. Eli said, “they asked me some questions. It was so busy there. My parents came in. About 20 other people came. My phone was blowing up with people from the church and school. The x-rays and CT scans took forever for the doctor to say, ‘it is clear. There are no broken bones, no sprain.”“I asked them, ‘Why is it swollen?’”“Because of the trauma. It swells up to protect itself. It will take about a week or so for it to go down.”Around 4 they went home to sleep. Except Eli could not sleep. “Everytime I started to fall asleep, I would relive the accident.” Finally around 6 a.m. he fell into bed and slept for several hours. When I saw him the next day, Eli was up and walking around, first with the crutches and then without, “I didn’t like how they felt,” he explained. So he hobbled, as did his mother. In her rush to see him in the ambulance, she fell, cutting her thumb, spraining her ankle and getting several cuts and scrapes. She did not make it to the ambulance. The first responders said, “No we don’t have time to wait. We have to get him there.” Three days later, Eli returned to school. “Everyone was asking about me. They were just worried about me, offering me rides to classes and work. I had my ten minutes of fame. That is pretty much gone. My pain is gone. In the grand scheme of things, to walk away from that crash, it is a miracle.” Someone asked Eli if he remembered what song he was listening to when it happened. He didn’t so he checked his log. He had been listening to “A Second Chance.”“I guess the big thing is I am meant for something. I have another chance. Even if you are not religious, ya gotta admit, there is a higher power.”