In 1990 I worked for my former employee for a while again.
He had a courier-service and I drove one of his VW vans during
the night-shift.
On Saturday march 17th I got into a rather nasty accident with
it.
I'm still not sure what happened since I don't remember anything
of the accident. Popular belief has it that I must have fallen
asleep behind the wheel.
The good news is that other than some small scars and the pics
there is nothing to remind me of the accident; I fully recovered
from it. Also it was a 'one-sided' accident; only me, the van and
a tree were involved.
The bad news is that although I was conscious when they found me,
I did laps into a coma and woke up two days later. Also it took 3
month of revalidation to learn how to walk again and another 2
years before I had the last surgery.
Here is a newspaper-clipping 
of the accident (in Dutch of course :).
Although it's not all to accurate, it describes how I hit the
tree at high speed at 6am and it took 45 minutes for someone to
find me.
The fire-department then needed another 20 minutes to cut me out
of the wreckage that I was stuck in.
It also says I was rushed to hospital with broken legs, lower
body and some internal wounds. As it turned out though I had a
fractured thigh-bone, some bruised ribs, some cuts in my face and
a light concussion.
This is what was left of the tree and the van.
As you can see I hit the tree on the left side; the drivers side.
When I was brought in the hospital they didn't quite know what
was wrong with me yet so they took a whole range of X-rays of me,
from head to toe.
They thought one of my toes had been broken too, but it turned
out just the nail of it had died because of the huge impact on
it.
As you can see in the X-Ray my left thigh had what is called a
'complicated fracture'; there was a piece missing in between.
They didn't find this piece during surgery, but it was
encapsulated by the body and then slowly pushed out. When it was
out far enough it was removed.
I still have that 'piece of me' somewhere...
BTW, the white things in my mouth are fillings.
To allow the bone to heal while I still would be able to walk
on it, they inserted a RVS pipe/pen right down the marrow of the
bone and secured it with screws at the top and bottom. As a
result of this I could walk out the hospital, granted on two
crutches, all by myself and start the revalidation.
The bone healed very fast, faster than they'd expected. The hard
part though was learning to walk again. Due to the impact my
muscles had 'forgotten' how to 'lock' my knee, so I would 'sink'
through it every time. Nothing 3 months of physical therapy
couldn't help though.
The pipe stayed in there for 2 years after which it was removed.
So these days it's hard to tell there was ever anything wrong
with me.
(Well, some say there still is :)
BTW, some people find it weird that I would be interested in
all this stuff; the X-Rays and what they did to me etc.
Personally I can't help myself but to be curious, even if the
cause for making these pics was not a happy one...
