July 6, 1968. My late friend Bob and I got off work at Clinton Corn Processing in Clinton, Iowa. We were college students, 19 years old, and this was our summer job.
We crossed the good old Mississippi River into Fulton, Ill. There was a tavern in Fulton where Bob had used his fake ID before. He bought us a load of alcohol. Our plan was to travel about 40 miles north, near Bellevue, Iowa, to go trout fishing.
Well, Bob’s Corvair left the highway at about 11 p.m. He suffered a severe neck laceration, but was able to get back to the road and flag down a vehicle.
I woke up 30 days later. My condition was called acute early severe craniocerebral trauma with cerebral concussion and contusion and probable cerebrospinal fluid rhinorrhoea.
Today, this has been shortened to “traumatic brain injury.”
This information comes from the hospital discharge papers I still have. What these papers don’t say is that this patient will experience long periods of life when he is totally convinced that he is lost in a nightmare. They don’t say that he will have to work for 40-plus years with half his body numb. They don’t say that alcohol gave this man a really, really bad trip!
But I made it. My late brother always called me the toughest SOB that he ever knew.
Of course, I know that it was not alcohol that caused the problem. It was my inability to stay away from it. Just another definition of alcoholism and the drama it brings to your life.
I wonder why the government allows the sale of such addictive products. Same thing with tobacco products. Is tax money more important than people’s health?
And here I am, 55 years later, still alive, with half my body numb. I am still alive because I quit alcohol in 1984, thanks to Serenity by the Sea Treatment Center in Seaside, Ore. (I also quit tobacco products with the help of acupuncture.)
I do wonder what my life would have been if Bob and I hadn’t gone fishing. We didn’t even catch any fish!
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