On December 21st, I was in the back of a car that was in an accident on a way to work. It was the first time I was in a vehicle that had its airbags deploy. I felt a sense of gratification and immortality and having survive something that totaled 3 cars. All I had was a mild headache. I walked to my office and was fine for a few hours, ish, then had the sudden urge to take a heavy nap. I went to the doctor; turns out I had had a mild concussion and moderate whiplash.

I, naturally, took the rest of the day off. I alerted friends on social media. Some responded with minor concussion stories of their own; some responded with horror stories – “…lingering effects lasting a year later”. I didn’t even remember hitting my head, though thinking back to it now, I don’t remember passing out, because who does? I was in the back of the car that was hit, and had to wake up the driver and front-seat passenger to get them out. So I was better than them, so I must have been fine, right? The accident looked like this:

t1 = pre-accident
t2 = post-accident

I spent the next 7 days in bed, in a dark room, with no stimulation. The whole point of being sick is watching TV and playing video games. I joked that I wished I had went into a coma instead so I could just skip it until the end, like the reality version of cryosleep. Even if I had a spare thought, I had to turn the lights on to write it down. I got gifted a colouring book later, which I appreciated. I listened to a ton of long-form audio books, detailed in my last post.

Late December/early January is a big time of year for me, a little bit more than most people, because its a confluence of holidays parties where you see some people once/year, one of my oldest friends’ birthdays, and my birthday, and CES, for which my work does a hot new tech demo for that I’m quite involved with. All of which I had to participate in with less enthusiasm or not at all this year.

I’m coming out of symptoms now, though staring too long at a screen or any amount of caffeine or alcohol re-triggers them. I’ve discovered f.lux‘s Dark Room mode for OS X, which shows the screen in monochrome inverted red, which is amazingly easier on my recovering brain.

So I’m calling it a do-over. This last month didn’t count; announcing TIMESKIPDUSTINMAS
Jan 24 – DustinMas Eve
Jan 25 – DustinMas
Jan 31 – New DustinYear’s Eve
Feb 1 – New DustinYear’s Day
Feb 11 – Dustin turns 31
This leap month should solve everything and I look forward to pretending this never happened. I feel this should be a more socially acceptable thing to do for other similar circumstances.

PS. It’s cool that airbags smell like burning fire. That really woke me up quick. I found out later that they are literally fireworks.

PPS. A few of my friends suggested I sue the accident-causer for all their worth. I haven’t had anything that my medical coverage doesn’t deal with with minimal fees, and I feel that people suing other people isn’t good in the grand karma scheme.

PPPS. I was in a Lyft car a the time of the accident. Lyft and the driver have been absolutely awesome during all of this. My driver was stoic and kept it together even though he had to lean on me for a bit. Lyft gave me a bunch of free ride credits after they heard about the accident and I made sure to tell them that it was absolutely not my driver’s fault.