HBO Smashed: Toxic Tales of Teens and Alcohol

I caught a piece of this documentary late last night.

Smashed: Toxic Tales of Teens and Alcohol

This resonates with me especially since most the devastation these kids were dealt was to their brains. As a head injury survivor, I was quickly taken back to my accident and realize how insanely lucky I was. Most of their trauma was due to the simple action of inertia and their brains bouncing back and forth against their skulls during impact. One girl’s brain slightly twisted.

The summer of 1985, my freshman year in High School, I was in a head-on collision with another motorcycle rider. My friends and I would load up our 80cc dirt bikes and camp for weeks at a grandmother’s farm in New Winchester, Indiana. The farm was complete with a 5 acre lake, plenty of fields, woods, and a small camp site with electricity. Time was split with building a dirt motorcross track, fishing, hunting, and riding.

Fourth of July weekend, after days of bottle rocket wars, my friend was riding at the track mostly hitting the large jump. I was at the camp site on the opposite end of the property. I’d gone there to grab some more cigarettes, was wearing a helmet, but didn’t fasten it since I was just heading up the road. At almost the exact same time, I decided to head to the track and he towards the site at 50+mph. We met head-on at the bottom of a dipping, gravel S-turn with no help from a large tree that blocks your view to oncoming traffic.

(I’m skipping a lot, realizing I should really write all this down sometime.)

The outcome was very straight forward. Boy meets boy head-on at 50+ miles an hour. One boy dies. Other boy destroys knee. When the paramedics arrived some twenty minutes after a neighbor found us, I was flat-lined, no pulse, on the way not to an NDA but to an NDE (Near Death Experience), ICU, coma, morphine, and stitches. I spent the rest of the summer recovering with a swollen brain and a constant two month headache unlike you’ve probably ever known even through migraines. After many neuro-psych tests, they determined that my brain damage wasn’t enough to keep from attending a normal school (I only lost 25 IQ points if you believe in IQ testing).

The point being, even though I can tell I’m not as sharp as I once was which fades with age as we all slow down, no one else can. Compared to the kids in this show, I appear unscathed from my battle with death. Until last night I never really considered the possible outcomes and have a better insight as to why people when they hear about my accident are so fascinated. Next time I will not skip the details even though I’ve told the story a hundred times. It has taken me thirty years to come to terms with how amazing I am.

The next portion of my story is where it gets more interesting; how I got a street motorcycle two years later (Honda CBR600), how I started college in Psychology to understand my brain since my doctors could never answer my questions, and how that path lead to a key insight to the dynamics of my cognitive abilities which got me into Physics with only a semester of Calculus.

Since this is the 20th Anniversary of my death, maybe I’ll throw a party!