this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
105 points (93.4% liked)

Asklemmy

43945 readers
859 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

How close was it?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] j4k3@lemmy.world 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Broken neck and back riding a bicycle (roadie/amateur racer) into two SUVs that were crashing in front of me. I took a 30mph hit directly to my head with nearly the entire force of my body into my forehead. As a reference, at sea level, a person diving from a ten story building would have a similar velocity hitting the ground head first. I was told I only survived because I was initially unconscious for 3 hours as the damage to C1 and the base of my skull would have been fatal if I had moved substantially before the swelling had time to build pressure.

[–] scytale@lemm.ee 10 points 1 year ago

Wow, it’s fortunate there wasn’t a bystander that tried to move you while you were out. I hope you’re doing ok now.

[–] ExLisper@linux.community 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
[–] j4k3@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was in ICU for two weeks with 3 days on critical round the clock watch. I don't care to talk about it because 10 years later I'm still disabled, but thanks for the shit comment

[–] ExLisper@linux.community 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Shit, meant to say 'Now that's close'. Stupid typo.

[–] j4k3@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thanks for mentioning. That kind of thing can wear hard on me. Shit happens. I could write a long list of all the junk that happened and all of my broken stuff, but at a certain point, one has to ask how they want to be defined themselves, and what it means to be a victim when the results of an event are never able to leave one's immediate consciousness. This is my pain. As I type this message, my inner voice is yelling over the constant annoying sound of a horn blowing in a figurative ear on my back. Nothing makes that pain go away. Meds just make me care less about yelling over it or the things I might be otherwise doing.

This is what it really means to barely survive. Injuries are ultimately easy. There is an enormous spectrum of what it means to survive and recover. It isn't some binary of did or didn't, or a trinary with paralysis. To really be close to that measure of "barely" and to stabilize at a point that is not much higher than "barely" THAT is what is remarkably hard. It is impossible to really relate this in words without a person experiencing it. One must mentally rebirth one's self from scratch with new expectations, interests, relationships, and worst of all dependencies on others, while dealing with isolation and really the death of one's self. That is truly hard.