Well, let me warm up the brain power and start this story up. Unfortunately or not, it is not a "onuce upon a time" so all things within are real unless otherwise told untrue. So it begins again... the tales of David Freeman and his fathers fateful day...
Setting.
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Date is August 19, 1996
Summer before Grade 10 almost at an End.
My sister, Christi, a year and a half younger than I, driving around town doing errands.
We had just dropped my father off at my mothers office, used to be his but he took over my grandfathers place of business and my mother began to operate the company. Bulk mailing services, was/is the business that is run out of that office.
There we had/have a truck to take large amounts of mail to the post office after the workers place labels and adds and what not into them. (( It's a unique business but does well, with political mailings during election seasons.))
David has just attained his drivers License a few days before.
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My sister and I had just dropped off my Dad at the office, and left to go to Ted Brown Music Company, she was in band, still is, and needed some music. I don't know how much you know about celluar phones these days, but there is a type that has a phone to phone paging, allowing you to talk like a walkie talkie back and forth to other phones in your plan. I had one, so did my mom and dad. Well, we were running this errand downtown Tacoma, across town and by the Port of Tacoma. The office probably 20 to 25 minutes away depending on which way and how traffic was. We were to come back and pick up our father and head off to get some gear for skiing or some such, it's fairly pointless whatever it was, point is we didn't make it back to pick him up. We got detoured through the Port, because of some road work in the downtown area, new Museum was going up I believe. We "beeped" my dad's phone to tell him what our plans were and our time to get back to him, and we got no answer. This wasn't really an issue, seeing that he left his phone all over the place and failed to answer it often. We "beeped" my mothers phone. Same thing. Also not a huge concern on our part, driving along towards the highway onramp, because she often went into the back to work the mail instead of sitting at her desk doing write-ups or answering the phone(s). So we called the office and got one of the employee's, who was to say the least a bit nuts at the time. We got ahold of our mother from her and were told to go home and NOT to go to the office. Dad had been in an accident with the Truck, and she'd get back to us later. Now, back then I was a good and safe driver to the T, except for that small nervous first day driving alone accident I got in and never told anyone about. The lady let me go because nothing happened so I never mentioned it to anyone, right? Right. I was a total wreck. My dad was my best bud at the time, and anything happening to him, and me not knowing EXACTLY what it was, was hard to deal with. My sister started crying as I remember, she might not recall that, and I just tensed up and sped up considerably. We met my mothers parents at the house who gave us no new information, which helped me not. Mother called back on her way up to the hospital, as best i recall, it's a fuzzy point starting here. The next clear memory i have is driving up to Seattle, where the Harbor View Medical Center is located, 32 miles or so away from my house freeway driving. I got up there to see the extent of his injuries, which were fairly bad as i was listening to someone explain what had happened.
There was a cart that had gotten wedged inbetween the truck and the loading dock. My dad set the truck brakes, with the engine running, and went behind and between the dock and truck end to pry out the cart...with it out, the micro-brakes failed, and the truck rolled back, crushing my dad across the hips. This held him there until someone jumped in the truck and pulled it away. His pelvic bone was crushed in 15 places, artery to his left leg cut. Without blood flow, you have roughly 6 hours before you HAVE to amputate the limb. He went 5 and a half hours without blood flow to his foot, before the doctors at the Army hospital could fabricate a new vien type item for the spot. Now has gortex there or some such. Once to harbor view, things started to get ugly for me. Shock, denial, total shut down type issues. The was by far the most tramatic event of my then short life, which looked to be spiraling further and faster down hill than i could have managed on my own merits. On some high floor, in some Intensive Care Unit, I found myself and my family, with one shattered and broken father. Like my 16 year old mind was going to handle that well. My school started up sometime in September, early part like most do. Father stayed in Harbor View Medical Center for a long time, which in turn got me out of class to visit him for days, and to run errands for him with his Credit Card for what he wanted for his room and what not. This was the time when he was comprehendable, between his buttoning the Morphine, and having surgeries. I believe that he had somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 operations, each given less than 02% chance of his survival. Some of the final ones, were such that he had his left foot amputated, due to gangreen starting to set in. That artifical vein and some doctors misfortune almost landed him dead instantly. Turns out that my father, was/is allergic to a drug called Heprine. It's used as a blood thinner of types, to prevent clotting of wounds for various reasons, fairly common of a thing in hospitals and operations. Well, him being allergic to this was not common. About 1/10th of 1% of the population is leathally allergic to the drug. My father was the first to survive Heprine Posioning in the United States, as far as I have been told. It was a stroke of luck that day it happened, that a specialist from British Columbia, Canada, was in the hospital. In BC, they had been using an experimental drug called Encrod, a Malysian Pit Vipers Venom to the rest of us, to counteract the Heprine effects. For those leathally allergic, Heprine starts to turn your blood solid. Encrod, as you might figure from a snake of this sorts, turns you into a hemophilac. In measured amounts, it saved my fathers life. Later, a few 6 or so months, my father moved down the street to recover from the amputation in a recovery building. It has a proper name other than this, but I forget it at the moment. He spent his time here resting and started physical thearapy after a time to build up the muscles he had not been using for so long. I visited less often here than I did in the hospital, to me it still felt the same as the other place, just more people in direct need of care in a smaller area. Amongst these times of him being in the hospital, I ventured out on my own a bit further than I would have if he had been around to say otherwise and enforce it. At the time of this summer, I had started to chat with a young lady that lived in Vancouver, Washington. About a 2 hour drive south towards the Oregon boarder from me in Tacoma. I ended up taking the car one Saturday morning and visited her. With that started my first of long distance romances based out of a chat room I had been in for a few years by that point. I visited her once more, and we stopped seeing each other on terms best left undiscussed here. I later picked up another conversation with a young lady in Victoria, BC. About a 2 hour boat ride from Seattle. I spoke with this young lady until I decided I could visit her as well. This time my father played a bigger part, as I had spent the month between ladies talking to various people around the world, and another 3 months getting to know this lass. My father paid my ferry ticket there and back, and again and again in later months until I started to pay my own way to see her monthly. Again, I was/am a multi-tasking lad, and was seeing about going to Texas for the days after christmas and my birthday. It was the blizard of '96, and I left the day of, and had a 18 hour plane trip, and had to stay a night over in a different city than my destination before connecting the next morning. My father, back at home now, had gone skiing within 2 months of being able to be out of the recovery ward. My psychiatrist described my attachment with this particular lass one of trying to replace the lost relationship and affection I had between my father and myself. Looking back I'd tend to agree with him, the amount I flung around my heart. When he met this lass in person, he decided he was wrong in his description, as it had been over a year since I had met and started to take the relationship we had seriously. Even 3 years later I still find myself with this particular lass, chatting in the same chat room, finding some of the lost friends I left so abruptly when my fathers accident occurred. Some remember me by name, some by who this lass was/is. Others just know me and kept in touch through the small channels I left open to do so in. I now find myself trying to rebuild my friends and acquaintances within TTR and a program called ICQ.
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