Attempted Jennacide
Late on Monday, April 19, 2004, my wife Jenna was critically injured when the 1995 Saturn she was riding in as front seat passenger was “T-boned” by a 4,000lb four-wheel drive Toyota pick-up truck, on the passenger side. The Toyota was doing at LEAST 50mph on the 65mph-limited four-lane rural highway when Jenna’s best friend K. pulled left at the last second right in front of the Toyota, resulting in the collision.
The Toyota impacted almost perfectly centered on Jenna’s door. I pulled the chrome ovoid “Toyota” emblem from the truck’s grille from the very center of the Saturn’s door trim. The impact collapsed the front passenger compartment in on Jenna, snapping her pelvis in two places, puncturing her bladder, tearing her liver and spleen, breaking a rib, bursting both lungs, cracking her first vertebrete under the skull, cracking the skull itself, and causing massive, almost complete, brain damage.
When she was admitted to UAB Medical Center’s emergency trauma unit approximately 30 minutes after the accident, Jenna was exhibiting nothing more than “abnormal responses to pain,” which is indicative of utterly massive brain trauma. She scored a worst-possible 3 out of 15 on the Glasgow Coma Scale, meaning that her slate had been wiped clean; as one of her neurologists conveyed it to me: it was as if a forest had been mowed down by bulldozers, and it was a matter of waiting to see how many trees were going to grow back.
This is actually the third time I’ve had to write this introduction to this blog, due to my POS computer crashing on me twice before. What I’m going to do is to include the posts I made on the 02 FAQ website to kind of bring things up to date as of about a week ago, then I will add more updates as needed. For now, she’s stable and doing well. Her personality seems to be leaking out from the cracks here and there… hard to say, tho. She still looks so sweet and innocent there, with her shaved, scarred-up head. Please bear with me as I intend to be as “graphic” as I feel is necessary, by the way, if you cant already have been able to tell…