Photo Credit: iStock.com/baona

In this medical fiction tale, Shannon tells her side of the story—or rather, the accident—that left her skull dislocated from her spine and her boyfriend dead.

This tale is one of a collection of stories that are like “Final Destination” meets “The Monkey’s Paw” (W. W. Jacobs, 1902). As such, they are tragedies that appeal most to readers who enjoy the inexorable pull of a story arc that leads to doom. The technical details surrounding the event are drawn from real cases in the US OSHA incident report database or similar sources and are, therefore, entirely realistic, even if seemingly outlandish.

My name is Shannon, I am a very unlikely survivor, and this is part of my story.

I survived an injury with almost impossible odds. But my injury is not the whole of me and it left me profoundly changed. I am not the sum of my suffering, but my injury certainly was a pivot in my journey. It has also been a lens through which my art, poetry, and writing are filtered. My injuries have shown me the best in people and exposed their worst.

My memories of the day it happened are shattered fragments. I remember leaving the bar and arguing with Gram because I thought, I knew, that he was too drunk to be driving. But I was young, and he was loud and forceful, and sometimes his bluster got him what he wanted. Sometimes it got him things he didn’t want. Ultimately, pushing me out of the way and ignoring me got him killed.

I remember part of the ride, trees, and a diner flashing by, and then I have an image of the back of a big, dirty, white truck. It’s like a black and white Polaroid image, detached from any context. It’s just there, and sometimes I see that image in my dreams. It doesn’t haunt me or make me feel anything. It’s just there. We hit that truck. Least ways, I hit it. Gram didn’t have time to brake, but he did swerve so that he wasn’t on the direct path of impact. But I was. I remember Gram shouting my name a few times, but I couldn’t answer because somehow, my face was between my chest, and I couldn’t move my mouth and all I could do was gurgle. Then I remember faces. People with helmets, caps. Serious faces. I remember stinks. Rubber, metal, gasoline, blood. There was shouting, machinery, and the sound of tearing metal. I remember a lot of blinding lights. I remember hands doing things around me, touching me, and then being lifted. The back of an ambulance, and faces talking to me, asking me things, and hands all over me. I passed out again, and when I woke up I was cold, in a hospital, lights were zipping past above me, another face was smiling at me, and for the first time I heard a voice. “Hello, Honey, I’m Julia. You have been in a car accident, and we are going to help you.” From then on, it was mostly quiet, and the faces all smiled down at me.

Click, Hummm, Bye-Bye, Shannon

The memories get clearer after that, and the jigsaw puzzle of my experience is a more complete picture, filled with people who were busy and focused. They explained, in what seemed like slightly exciting terms, that I had been “internally decapitated” and that the chances of surviving it were tiny, tiny, tiny. I wasn’t quite sure what to think of that. Lucky, I guess? But I also sometimes felt like a lab specimen or a museum piece for people to gawk at—and boy, did they gawk. I couldn’t count the number of serious faces in white coats that stopped by. Oh yes, let me tell you about that. Because my skull bone was no longer anchored to my spine, they had screwed metal rods into my bones all over the place, and my head, spine, and chest all moved together because metal rods were screwed into the bones and bolted together. Into the bone! Looking into a mirror was so weird. They had also attached me to a drug machine, and occasionally it would make a faint hum and click, and happy juice would go into my drip, and I would be sliding down into sleep. Click, hummmm, bye-bye, Shannon. I got to know the nurses, the doctor, and the techs well, who used spanners and a screwdriver to adjust the cage of rods around my head.

When they allowed visitors, there was Gram and his buddies and a few of my friends. Gram’s buddies just stank the place up, and they were rowdy. Two of them ducked off with a packet of weed that they said they’d brought for me, but like the fruit and candies they gave me, Gram’s crowd went through them like locusts. I was already tired by the time the nurse came to tell them to buzz off, and the pain had started up again. It was clawing like rats in all the places they had cut me open or screwed things into me, and Gram was nattering on about how unfair this all was to him, how his wheels had been totaled, how he got a DUI charge, and on and on and on about himself and his suffering. Not one apology for being drunk at the wheel. Not even one mention that here I was, still on the edge of death because of him. Not one stinking word of empathy, sympathy, or even that I was pretty banged up. It was all about him, all about how this hurt him, and he started telling me that I owed him for the rent and for replacing his wheels. I was reaching for the call button to ask a nurse to make him go away, but my hand found something else. I had closed my fingers around the handle of the screwdriver the tech used on my cage. The pain was screaming at me, and Gram just kept yapping. Then my arm moved, and then click … hmmm … and a second or two later, it was bye-bye, Shannon, and everything was warm and billowy and quiet.

Beyond the Wreckage: Living, Creating, & Moving On

When I woke up, the pain was way out at the edges, it was feeding time, and the nurse was looking solemn. She said Gram was dead—one of his friends had stabbed him and ran away. It was a shock, but my last real memory of Gram was this floating face yapping and complaining, so I must admit that the news brought more relief than sorrow.

A few weeks later I was at home again. Eventually, my cage was removed, and my crossed eyes were fixed. I could walk, I could brush my hair and do pretty much everything for myself again. People always want to hear about the accident, and many are a bit freaked out by the trachea, but I learned to live with that. My life is filled with my poetry, my writing, my art, and with living my life. My life is full of people who also do those things, and all those things make it a far bigger universe than just being a lucky survivor. So: My message to you is to acknowledge your injuries, pay gratitude to those who lift you up, and to live your best life… and maybe also to surround yourself with interesting people, never climb into a car with a drunk, and if the occasion arises, stab that drunk in the head and move on.

Editor’s Note: This is a fictionalized tale that is based on a true story.

Missed the first two parts of Shannon’s story? Click to read Shannon, Part 1: Growing a Spine  and Shannon, Part 2: A Screwy Situation