Crash!

OK, so I flew to Indianapolis to see Jon's recital and the University of Illinois. After driving south about an hour in my white Chevy Malibu rental car, I checked my directions and saw that I needed to turn left soon. I got in the left lane of the highway. After that, there was a sudden image of a huge Suburban-like vehicle directly in front of me.

Then I was sitting in the grass by the side of the road, with my left shoulder hurting quite badly. I didn't know what had happened. Had I fallen asleep at the wheel? It was about 1 in the morning, but I wasn't that tired and I had just had a cup of coffee. Looking behind me, I saw both airbags in the rental car deployed, and the hood bent at an expensively-damaged-looking angle. There were some people around, but no one would tell me what happened, or more importantly, if I was at fault. There were lots of fire trucks and police cars.

Then a policeman came up to me and said, "Even though you're feeling fine (?!?!?!), we still think you should go to the hospital and get checked out." Like what, Jon was going to come pick me up and take me home on the handles of his bicycle?

They took me to Bloomington Hospital in an ambulance, and when they got there they X-rayed me, revealing a rib broken by the impact of the seat belt-- a rib under the collarbone, which apparently requires a huge force in order to break it-- and cat-scanned me, revealing that the rib hadn't punctured a lung or a blood vessel. They drew my blood and injected me with some really great narcotics. Jon had ridden his bike out to the hospital to hang out with me. The police came by to give me some paperwork and say that the other guy was at fault.

His story was that he was waiting in the cross street to turn left onto the highway, and I had my left blinker on, so he decided to turn into my lane in front of me, but then once he had committed himself to turning, I turned off my blinker, and then we collided. I'm pretty sure that the blinker was on because I was moving to the left lane from the right lane. Anyway, I had the right of way even if I were turning into the cross street, on account of I was going 55 mph and he was stopped. Also, there was practically no one on the road, so if he had waited until I went by, he would have probably had a five-minute window in which to turn onto the highway.

So I've been pretty much lying around Jon's house taking painkillers ever since. I'm going to stay an extra day and go see UIUC, and I currently have no way of getting from there to here. Renting another car won't work because I can't drive it under the influence of the painkillers.

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