A Recipe for Forgiveness
The Best Day and the Worst Day of My Life
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The best day and the worst day of my life are actually the same. For several years, I had a reoccurring dream that I would be involved in a horrific accident. My dream gave all the details right down to the exact minute it would occur.
When the night finally arrived, I was riding my motorcycle down a very busy highway in Chicago. I was driving 50 miles per hour in the right lane when an 18-wheeler truck started to pass me on the left at 70 to 80 miles per hour. As the truck pulled alongside me the driver began merging into my lane.
Time slowed as I was broadsided by the zooming truck and sent flying in the air with my motorcycle on a series of 10 cartwheels that stretched far down the road. On the first cartwheel, my motorcycle landed on the lower part of my right leg and bent it 90 degrees. In the second cartwheel, my knee smashed into the gas tank and shattered my hip and pelvis. I was flung like a rag doll as he continued down the road never to stop or be caught.
I lay broken in the middle of an 8-lane highway with cars swerving around me praying to gods I had never prayed to before. Blood poured out of me like a swollen river bursting out of its banks. I kept waiting for a car to finish me off when two men stopped their car and blocked my broken body. Charles thought I was dead because the truck had only missed running over my head by an inch. He had his phone handy and asked if he could call anyone fearing my next words might be my last. I gave him my mother’s name.
The ambulance arrived a minute later. If the ambulance had taken another 5 minutes no one would ever read my story. Coincidently the ambulance driver said he had been hit by a car exactly in the same spot one year prior to the date almost exactly to the minute. I was loaded onto the ambulance and sped off with sirens screaming in the night.
At the Cook County Trauma Center, I was given a quick check and then waited hours before the doctors came back to me. It was one of the bloodiest nights in Chicago history. I vaguely remember 4 people dying on the gurneys directly next to me, including a woman who had been stabbed 50 times by her boyfriend. I remember blood squirting everywhere and the awful sound of her mother…
