As someone who has endured and emerged from injuries sustained due to life-threatening, blunt-force trauma, the physical and psychological wounds heal in time, but nagging reminders remain. In my case thirty years after and for the rest of my life.
On the evening of July 6, 1994, I was heading home to Van Nuys from Hollywood on my Kawasaki 1000CSR to meet my then-girlfriend Christina to go see the late showing of “Forrest Gump,” which opened that day. Heading westbound on Burbank Boulevard between Woodman and the street I lived on, I was traveling about 40mph when the driver of a white Ford Taurus sedan without checking behind him pulled out from the curb to make a u-turn about 40 feet in front of me. I had zero time to react, T-boned the driver-side door and basically went head first through the driver-side window and up into the door frame.
I was wearing a full-faced helmet,but it didn’t prevent my face from sustaining the bulk of the injuries. My nose was crushed. Front teeth top and bottom were either sheared off or broken. My upper jaw was fractured, my right eyelid torn off and my right eye partially avulsed. And I was concussed.
I won’t go into the aftermath other than to say the next thing I knew I was on my feet in the middle of the street, my face a waterfall of blood thinking I was going to suffocate because I couldn’t breath — at least I couldn’t through the mess that moments ago been my perfectly function nose until I distinctly heard a voice saying “Breath through your mouth.” I’m not sure if it was the voice of someone at the scene or a voice inside my head, but it did the trick.
Paramedics and police arrived soon after and I was transported to Sherman Oaks Hospital where the long and painful process of putting me back together again began.
I ultimately ended up in the care of an cosmetic eye doctor named Stein. Based in Santa Monica. His plan was to take a patch of skin from behind my right ear and use it to recreate my right eyelid. And the surgery worked, except for one little problem that recurs oh about every six months or so. See, the section of skin he harvested from my right ear and rigged onto what remained of my right eyelid came fully equipped with a couple of still-functioning hair follicles, and those hairs grow, eventually after a few month getting to a length where they curl down and wreak frustrating havoc on my right eye.
Now in the grand scheme of things, it should be no big deal, right? In a perfect world I’d just monitor it and when the hairs get to be about an eighth or quarter-inch I’d just grab the tweezers and pluck ’em. Well, that’s all well and good, but number one and two they grow right on the edge of the eyelid and they’re damn stubborn to pull. When I do, literally the eyelid comes with the hair until finally the follicle gives. And when it does release it does so with an annoying pinching pain. Worse, is when I go to pull it and because my grip on it is poor instead of getting it out root and all I instead break a small part off.
So by and large, it’s literally “out of sight, out of mind,” or at least “out of eye, out of mind.” Then, when I know it’s back in all its irritating glory I’ll often spend a week or two just rubbing it up out of my eye until I finally give up, dig around for it until I get it firmly between my index finger and thumb with the best grip I can muster and pull — not quickly, but sloooooowly to ensure it all comes out in the end.
Then it starts all over again.
It’s both a biannual pain in the ass and a biannual reminder of that horrible night — a byproduct more than 30 yeasrs and counting that has been, is, and will be a part of my life.
Below, at three-quarters of an inch is the most recent culprit:
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