On Driving
Even before I was old enough to drive, I had stress nightmares behind the wheel of a car I couldn’t control. The earliest version I remember had me careening down a hill with no brakes, my pet Froggy (an invasive species once given away during Girl Scout overnight trips to the COSI museum in Columbus) in a bowl riding shotgun with water sloshing onto the upholstery.
Once I actually learned to drive, the nightmares became more specific. I could attempt to steer the car, but it never seemed to go quite where I had intended. Speed was no longer the issue, but the loss of minor control felt surprisingly worse. At least on the downward slope there were no obstacles and the course was straight. In these new nightmares, the car would fail to stop and crash lightly into a fence, or a turn would fall short and scrape against a building or another car.
One night this week, I was driving a city bus with my mom in the passenger seat. She was training me, as she had taken a job as a bus driver, so she was responsible for my performance. I tried a left turn and instead bounded forward over a median and into a strip mall parking lot, Walmart looming in the distance. A police officer came out of nowhere to give me a ticket and warn my mom that her license could be taken away if I continued to cause accidents.
I’ve always been a timid driver. My mom, who took me for my first turn around the Center Middle School parking lot in celebration of passing my learner’s permit test, had to tell me several times to put my foot on the gas pedal rather than letting the car’s idle inertia pull it forward. I’ve been known to wait three or four cars longer than necessary to make sure there is a wide enough gap to make a turn.
I have one driving ticket on my record. I was driving my three-year-old son to daycare one morning, explaining about why clouds have different shapes or some other random fact he had asked about, and on a downward slope I lost track of my speed and was going 38 in a 25. Not my proudest moment, getting pulled over with a child in the back seat.
I have been involved in four car accidents. I’ve been rear-ended twice, t-boned once (a hit and run that still angers me to this day), and one horrific set of coincidences that made me forever fearful of the power of an automobile.
As a senior in high school, I spent many afternoons at a friend’s house not more than a ten minute drive from the apartment where I lived with my family. On this particular afternoon, I was at my friend’s house explaining to her about a funny reflection in a picture on the front of that day’s newspaper. She hadn’t seen it, and in the age before Google images, the only way to share it was to go home, grab the newspaper, and bring it back to her house. A twenty minute round trip at most.
I can remember clearly that image on the newspaper. I can remember the feeling of being in my car trying to make a right turn out of our apartment complex into three lanes of traffic. I can remember vaguely seeing someone walking on the sidewalk near my car. I remember clearly looking to make sure the walker was not on the sidewalk before I started my turn.
Characters in books and movies can always recall the weather, what they were wearing, and every single detail of any event. When we are exposed to these descriptions, it makes us believe that everyone experiences important events as true, perfect memories that can be recalled in exact detail. But our brains are built to help us survive, and survival sometimes requires a measure of forgetfulness and blurred edges. Women often forget between children how painful childbirth can be. A traumatic event is a brain wound that must be healed over. All that remains is the scar.
For me, the actual accident always occurs in a series of feelings and still images. The horrible THUMP of the car as I pulled forward, and the resulting gut wrench as I realized what that could be. The image of a body lying in the street, a bloody clump of white hair nearby as seen through my rear-view mirror. Myself, sitting on the sidewalk screaming and crying as my dad ran from our apartment. Sitting in the backseat of a police car writing out my version of events.
We learned later that eye witnesses saw the elderly woman fall in front of my car, and she lay there searching for her glasses. I never saw her fall. I just knew there was no longer anyone walking on the sidewalk. I couldn’t have seen her, as my car was at a slight incline which blocked the view of anything near to my front bumper. The police could tell from the angles and tire marks that I had not sped as I pulled out, though I was trying to quickly get into traffic. It was a horrible accident, but it was not my fault. The woman later died of her injuries.
Trauma is a funny thing. You would think that I’d be terrified of driving because of this accident, but for many years my terror was for OTHER people driving. I’m an anxious person by nature, and my way of easing my anxiety is often to take complete control of a situation. I’d rather be the one behind the wheel so I can control the speed of the car and minimize all chances for mistakes.
You can imagine my terror on my way to work one day when I suddenly lost track of where I was on a road I’d driven on at least a weekly basis since beginning to work at the library. I had come back, I thought, from months of sleep deprivation, pain, and medication altering to a fairly regular work routine, though I was still taking far too many days off as the exhaustion of keeping regular hours would catch up to me. I thought I was healing. I thought I was getting better.
One momentary lapse of memory, while scary, was not going to stop me. It was a bad day, like the days I was taking off to sleep for an extra 8 hours. It was a reason to take better care of myself and rest. But then it happened again. And again. On roads I’d traveled since childhood, roads that I used to bike on when I was too young to drive.
And I was running red lights. Not purposely, but my reaction times were running slow. I was already in the intersection before my foot got the message to hit the brake pedal. I would forget to look before turning. I pulled out of a parking space without checking the rear view mirror.
The worst episode came on the Ohio Turnpike, a road I traveled every day. It was snowing and blowing just enough that morning to obscure the scenery on either side of the highway. The effect was instant and terrifying. My brain knew I was on I-80, but it didn’t know where, and I couldn’t get any bearings. When my exit approached, it didn’t look familiar, though the logic center of my brain was yelling that this was the place to get off. I actually had to yell at myself in the car to convince my addled brain that this was really the place. The moment passed as soon as I saw the exit gates, but nothing makes you feel more like you’re losing your mind than arguing out loud with yourself.
I decided I needed to stop driving. I couldn’t risk having another accident, and certainly not on the 45-minute drive to work or on any trip with my kids in the car. I saw neurologist after neurologist trying to figure out what was wrong, and the final diagnosis was a traffic jam in my brain. Neurons in the front of my brain were taking too long to get to the back of my brain. To fix it, I needed to fix the exhaustion. The same exhaustion caused by the drugs that keep my Crohn’s disease from killing me and blocking the pain from fibromyalgia. The same exhaustion caused by my fatty liver, which was caused by side effects from Crohn’s disease and Crohn’s disease treatments. In other words, there was no fixing the brain processing problem in the near future.
I haven’t driven more than a few streets away from my home since January, but my husband and I have started the process to get our driver’s licenses transferred to our new state. No doctor wanted to tell me I can’t drive at all, because my problems seem minor to them at this point. Most days I’m still okay enough to handle a trip around the block, but I haven’t been behind the wheel for months, and I don’t intend to drive unless it’s an emergency.
Nothing has made me feel like an invalid more than surrendering my freedom of movement. That being said, giving up driving was the decision through this entire process of declining health that has felt the most right. It takes so much energy to keep track of your route, the other cars, and all of the steps required in operating a vehicle. Even if your body goes through the motions automatically, that energy is draining away from other brain functions. I only have so much energy to spend, and I never want to be in a position where my energy sinks at a critical moment.
I think my driving nightmares symbolize times when I feel out of control, and right now I feel like I am at the mercy of my diseases. There will likely be even more unconscious visions of careening buses and cars in my future. At least I can wake up knowing no one has been killed or injured because of my lapse in judgment.
