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Buckle up, yo
Apr. 15th, 2007 12:04 pmA paramedic's view of why you should always wear a seatbelt, over on Making Light.
Sometime around now is the 10th anniversary of the time I destroyed my Chevy Nova in a nighttime head-on with a big pickup truck, up in Bangor. I walked away from it with a bruised liver, which healed within days. The bruise was from my seatbelt squeezing my ribs tight. If I hadn't received that bruise, I would probably be dead, or something like it. (The other driver was in an enormous vehicle and barely felt anything. He was very kind, though.)
I kind of shudder to think that I didn't make a habit of putting on seatbelts until college. Dopey as it seems, the gory lectures in the driver's ed course I took right before freshman year sold me on it. When I was growing up, only my brother Peter had a hard rule about everyone in his car being belted - probably because he was scared straight by the same sorts of lectures. My parents are old enough to have missed all that, and so I rarely buckled up through most of my childhood. Yeesh.
Sometime around now is the 10th anniversary of the time I destroyed my Chevy Nova in a nighttime head-on with a big pickup truck, up in Bangor. I walked away from it with a bruised liver, which healed within days. The bruise was from my seatbelt squeezing my ribs tight. If I hadn't received that bruise, I would probably be dead, or something like it. (The other driver was in an enormous vehicle and barely felt anything. He was very kind, though.)
I kind of shudder to think that I didn't make a habit of putting on seatbelts until college. Dopey as it seems, the gory lectures in the driver's ed course I took right before freshman year sold me on it. When I was growing up, only my brother Peter had a hard rule about everyone in his car being belted - probably because he was scared straight by the same sorts of lectures. My parents are old enough to have missed all that, and so I rarely buckled up through most of my childhood. Yeesh.