Already 15 minutes late punching out at work, I heard my name page over the intercom. "Telephone call, line 2." I dutifully responded to the page, only to hear my mother's frantic voice. She said: "Your sister Deb is in the hospital. She was in an
accident. She was going down a hill and couldn't stop at the bottom and smashed into a van."
Instantly, I had fabricated an image of the accident in my head. There was my sister going down Leonard in her blue van. Just before her mailbox and after the hill, there is another van-- the one that she smashes into. It was all so clear.
About two hours later, I was sitting with one mom, three non-Deb sisters, one brother-in-law, five nephews, and three nieces at church for the usual Sunday mass. We got to talking about the accident after church, and my 14-year-old nephew asks "Why didn't she just roll off at the bottom." I was a bit confused. Roll off a car? It was then that I found out that my sister was not driving a van, but instead she was being driven by a sled. My mom neglected to mention that to me earlier on the phone.
From what details are now clear in my head, Deb and my niece were going really fast down a hill. When Deb realized that they were going to hit a van parked near the bottom of the hill, she pushed my niece off the sled. My niece rolled down the hill in decent condition. My sister, however, traveled through the air at 25 miles per hour and hit the van's hood so hard that she made a dent in it.
Anyway, she made it out of the accident with some internal bleeding, a cracked rib or so, back isses, and a plethora of bruises coloring her body. Now she is loaded on vicadin and doing fairly well. The moral of the story is if you are going to go sledding down a hill with a motor vehicle parked close to the bottom, then you better bring some vicadin along just in case your face meets the hood of that motor vehicle.