Brooke's first writing

Brooke is learning a hands-free computer program called Dragon Naturally Speaking--you just talk into the computer and it types out what you say. Here's his first writing, an account of the bicycle crash--it may be that some of the details are a bit different but these are his words:



No Title

I don't remember the accident itself. I don't even remember where I was in city Creek Canyon, perhaps at the dangerous corner near where the tanks used to be, but the place of the accident I'm still not sure of, although I could find out from several people I know were witnesses. I have no recollection of the crash, perhaps scream as we both turned in the same direction to avoid one another. When I was on the ground or the pavement (I don't know which it was at this point) the only words I recall uttering were, “I can't breathe.” After that I was unconscious until I woke up in the hospital about thirty-six hours later.

I have talked to someone who was present at the scene of the accident (obviously I haven't gotten all the information from him yet). He appeared in my room at Rehab unexpectedly one morning while I was doing exercises with my therapist on my left hand. He was apologetic for having disturbed us, but he looked like a person I wanted to talk to. He introduced himself as someone who was present at the scene of the accident. He had been riding a mountain bike behind the person I hit. When he saw me on the ground he got off his bike and took my pulse. He told my therapist and me that I had no pulse and that my face was gray. A minute later he told us a woman jogger appeared who introduced herself as a life flight nurse and immediately began to pump my chest. Another witness began CPR almost immediately. They kept me alive until the ambulance came about seven minutes later. My therapist, who oddly has the same first name as I do, stood up during this story and stepped away to be polite. After the story was over I looked up and I noticed that tears were running down her cheeks. I am still utterly mystified by the timing of the life flight nurse's appearance on the scene. She saved my life, and I still don't know who she was. Seconds made a difference in the accident, and minutes made the difference in my being alive to write this. Life is strange.

Thirty-six hours later I woke up in the ICU of the University of Utah Hospital. (I say “wake-up”, but it wasn't really waking up but rather a kind of dim, blurried, horrified, painful dawning of consciousness surrounded by the faces of people I dimly recognized and some I didn't.)





Brooke