Seatbelt saved my life, twice - that's food for thought today

Updated: 2013-01-30 10:51

By Erik Nilsson (China Daily)

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The spray of glass whooshed up my nose.

Seatbelt saved my life, twice - that's food for thought today

I don't remember that moment - or the three days that followed.

My family, largely citing the newspaper, filled me in.

I was 16 and riding shotgun when a friend zipped through a red light. This caused the first car to T-bone the passenger door. The trajectory of that rammed us head-on into a pickup truck.

The passenger side - and especially its windows - imploded on me as the first collision's epicenter.

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To this day, scars dribble from my nostril, and my septum is "deviated" - the clinical term for crooked.

Seatbelt saved my life, twice - that's food for thought today

Fictional truth to power 

Seatbelt saved my life, twice - that's food for thought today

Emotional appeal 

Seatbelt saved my life, twice - that's food for thought today

Meet Barbie's much older Chinese sisters 

The driver, Dave, later recalled shrieking at the sky, clutching my juddering body until the ambulances arrived. He thought he'd killed his best friend.

I don't remember that. He'll never forget it.

The first thing I remember is coming to days later, with family and many friends stooped over, staring at me.

I asked them what had happened. Apparently, I'd been doing so for the past three days - several times a minute, without recalling what they'd said seconds before. I'd also been asking for "softies" - a word I apparently made up as my brain swelled to describe a milkshake.

They told me I'd been in a car accident and sustained a concussion. I also had lacerations and stitches fastening my nose, mouth and hands, and broke my nose and cheekbone.

A month later, surgeons extracted a pinky-finger-sized shard of glass wedged in my nasal passage. That was a surprise to us all. While I'll likely never remember the pain of the crash, I'll certainly never forget the agony of that operation.

From the moment I left the hospital, I swore I'd never get into a car without a seatbelt. Nobody does in the United States, anyway.

Then, I arrived in China and did so every day for the past seven years.

I even forget to buckle up when I visit the US, until family and friends gloweringly remind me.

But all of that changed last week in Beijing.

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