The Leen

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It’s been quite the year for us, full of events that were made up of really hard things intertwined with really good things.

My pregnancy with Elanor and her birth was the first hard/good thing to happen. She is amazing, and wonderful, and definitely one of the highlights of the year: the ultimate good thing. But my pregnancy with her really took a toll on my body, and her birth was long and difficult and painful and not at all the birth I had wanted or envisioned. Still, the good that came out of her birth was so wonderful; knowing her and having her as our daughter is a joy.

The second such event was my heart incident in May. Obviously, the bad part is that it happened in the first place and the good part is that I’m alive. The difficult parts of that event, though, are still echoing through our lives. (That’s another post in and of itself. It’s nothing catastrophic, just new doctors with new theories and new tests to run, following which I may have a new diagnosis. But all of that is waiting on some insurance logistics to get straightened out so it will be well into the new year before I have anything to report on this front.) The fact that I came so very close to death is something that is hard to shake, especially for my mom, I think, and for Brett, too, although he’s somewhat reluctant to admit it.

The third bad/good event happened on Christmas Eve.

As I’ve said, it’s been snowy here in the Northwest for the past couple of weeks. (It’s actually melted now, but only as of yesterday.) Anyway, that much snow is unheard of for this area of the country (I think we had about 12 inches here!), and what’s even more shocking is that it stuck around for two weeks. Generally, the temperatures rise and the rain typically melts it within 24 hours.

The roads have been pretty icky in the city, but they’ve been totally managable. I mean, hey, like I have said before, we know how to drive in snow. So despite our parents’ protests to not come down for Christmas if the roads were bad, we loaded up our friend Robbie’s Jeep, turned on the four-wheel-drive, and left our house about 8:30 a.m. on Christmas Eve, ready to get to Portland and start celebrating with our families.

We were borrowing Robbie’s Jeep because he went out of town for the holiday, and since we don’t have a car, he offered to let us use it to get to see our families in Portland to save the $200 on the rental car if we’d drive him to the airport before we left town.

So, we dropped him at the airport and we were driving down I-5 and were just south of Olympia. The pavement, up to this point, had just been bare and wet, nothing bad at all. I had just taken a break from writing a year-in-review blog post to call my mom to try to firm up our plans for later in the day. The two of us were chatting, and I had just updated her about where we were, how the roads were, and when we thought we’d arrive when all of the sudden there was some slush on the road, in the left lane, where we were traveling. Brett had only been going about 50, and he immediately slowed down. We slid a little, he slowed down some more. He put his blinker on to get into the right lane, going maybe 40 or 45 at this point, and started to get over.

The tires must have hit the snow just exactly wrong, and we started to slide sideways, then the back of the car came around and we started to spin in a circle in the left lane of the interstate.

The back of the car hit the median, bounced us off, and rolled us over.

We landed tires down, facing backwards in the lane we’d just been traveling in. Brett and I both thought at that moment that we’d jumped the median but thank God we hadn’t. We also didn’t hit any cars and no one hit us — a huge miracle.

Elanor had been asleep and she was, obviously, woken up by the screaming and crashing. Brett was able to turn right around and get her out and she calmed down and seemed fine once she was in our arms.

I somehow managed to hold onto the phone the entire time, even as Brett and I screamed and we rolled. My poor mom heard the whole thing happen and was terrified. As soon as we landed I told her, “We’re fine, we’re all fine, I have to go,” and hung up because I needed to take Elanor from Brett. She, of course, was freaked out, and I felt bad just hanging up, but I had to help Elanor more than I needed to reassure my mom.

Thankfully, an off-duty firefighter was a few cars back so he stopped and was able to help us right away, before the state patrol and firefighters and paramedics arrived. Having him there was wonderful and very reassuring. We needed someone to take charge and tell us what to do; the four minutes or so until the emergency personnel arrived seemed long enough with someone there. It would have seemed like an eternity if he hadn’t been. So, to Steve from the Black Lake Fire Department: thank you.

The paramedics said it really didn’t seem like we needed to go to the ER, and having had our fill of ambulance rides for the year since we took several around the time of my heart incident, we agreed with them. At that point we just wanted to get to our families and did not want to spend hours and hours in the ER on Christmas Eve. Brett and I are sore, obviously, but other than that, all we came away with was a few bumps and bruises (my laptop was closed in my lap and hit me in the head; I’ve got a nice bruise from that) and I have a small cut on my cheek from the glass from the windshield.

The state patrol had us drive the car off the freeway, even, which is something of a miracle: even though it’s completely totaled we are okay, were able to walk away, and could drive it off the interstate. My laptop is fine, although the case is scratched, my glasses didn’t break, our camera had been sitting in the back seat and it was fine, too. Even the French press we had in the back for Rachel for Christmas didn’t break. (I was shocked it was in one piece when she opened it!)

After we got off the highway and the car was towed away, we wound up renting a car and continuing on our trip since we were already nearly halfway there and we’d have to drive at least an hour and a half to get home anyway. Before we left Olympia, we stopped at Target and I bought a new carseat for Elanor (the same one, since it seemed to work so well before — the Graco ComfortSport).

We talked to Robbie, the owner of the car, when we were still sitting on the highway. Obviously, we feel awful about it, but there was truly nothing Brett could have done differently. He wasn’t being reckless, and was driving at a safe speed given what the conditions were.

Anyway, the whole thing was terrifying and not a fun way to spend Christmas Eve but we are all okay and we are so thankful for that, and so glad, too, that we were able to be with our families to celebrate. Once we were able to forget about how awful the accident was, we had an awesome time and are so glad we made it to Portland after all.

The bottom line is that we are just so thankful that we’re all okay. We keep jokingly saying to each other that we can only cheat death so many times in one year. It’s been quite a year, and these are only the life-threatening events. I left out all the hard but not life-threatening things: going back to work in April after my maternity leave was over and then that month where I worked full-time, Brett traveling so much this fall, being on a really tight budget, Brett and I enduring some challenges in our relationship with each other, a rodent infestation in our house (yeah, that was really fun…not) — I could go on, but I’ll stop right there. It’s just been hard, and 2006 and 2007 were that way, too: Brett being jobless, having a miscarriage, then being pregnant and so sick and miserable.

We are so ready for a change from that pattern. We both hope, along with our families, that 2009 holds nothing but routine, boring, normal life for us, or at least that the only big events are thoroughly good ones. We are tired of having these brushes with death; although we’re grateful to have been able to walk away from all of them with everything intact, we’d much prefer avoiding them altogether.

I’ll post something about our actual Christmas soon, probably mostly pictures since I took about a jillion of them. It was a very fun time; we felt very loved and blessed by our families, and so grateful to be with them on the holiday. Elanor had a great time, too, and I’m happy that we spent her first Christmas with all of our loved ones — even if getting there was not a fun experience.