It was one of the most exhilarating feelings of my life. I had just closed the biggest deal of my career. After 18 months of ups and downs, I sat at the closing table in Milan and watched my client sell an industrial-scale infrastructure asset
This post is a continuation from Part 4. The next 72 hours were tough – some of the hardest of my life. The curtains were drawn in the ICU room. Everything was dark and my vision blurry. I felt like I got run over by
This post is a continuation from Part 3. I felt like a junkie, morphine pumping through my veins. I was numb. I would often lapse into a semi-conscious state and forget that I was laying in a hospital bed with a shattered pelvis. Then I
This post is a continuation from Part 2. The next morning, I came to and realized that I was still alive. I wasn’t sure at first. It took a few minutes for the fuzz from the night before to wear off. My hospital room became
It seemed like it took a while for the ambulance to arrive, but it was probably less than five minutes. Time moves slowly when you can hear the pounding of every heartbeat. I don’t remember much of those few minutes, other than feeling cold. There was too much going on to feel scared, but I knew something was wrong with my body.
When the ambulance arrived, the EMT ran up and looked at me through the shattered driver window. She asked me if I could move, and I shook my head no. She gave a firm tug on the driver door to see if it would open. It barely moved. One of her teammates brought the ‘jaws of life’ machine over to pry the door open, but couldn’t fit it underneath the edge of the door. No luck.
Then they told me that they were going to try to pull me out from the passenger side of the car. Considering the growing feeling of numbness in my midsection and lower extremities, nothing about this idea excited me. But I shook my head yes and said “OK”, knowing I had to get out of the car and get to a hospital.
On August 1, 2002, it was an uncomfortably hot and humid day in Columbia, South Carolina – which isn’t uncommon that time of year. I was living there that summer after my sophomore year of college, enrolled in full-time summer classes as I prepared to spend my junior year abroad in Nice, France. Due to the heat that day, I decided to drive to class instead of walk. My spirits were light and I was in a good headspace. A few more weeks of finishing up my summer classes and I was off to the Riviera. I was excited about the year to come.
My drive home after class took me down Greene Street – heading towards my apartment in the Five Points neighborhood. Just down the hill from campus, there’s a railroad track crossing Greene. Trains stopped there often, sometimes at a standstill, other times creeping along at a snail’s pace as the train navigated through the city. Sometimes, if I was on foot, the trains would be moving so slowly that I would climb through between the railcars to get across.
So I wasn’t surprised that day when there was a train stopped on the track in front of me as I came down Greene. Just another normal day. I knew of a quick bypass and made a right on Laurens Street. Laurens is a narrow side street that snakes downhill along the tracks to the next block where I could cross underneath the tracks on Blossom Street. I rolled down Laurens and was about to make a left on Blossom when it happened.