You are driving down the highway. You are sailing along on your way to something you just can’t miss. Music playing on the radio. You are singing along. Life is good.

Suddenly, you react before you even realize what is happening. There is an accident happening just up the highway in front of you. You are looking all around to avoid being hit as you slam on your brakes. You come to a sudden stop. Your coffee landed in the floorboard. The cars behind you managed to stop without any more “accidents” happening.

You, along with other drivers, jump out and run to see if there are survivors to be helped. There is a person laying in a pool of blood at the edge of the road. They must have been thrown from the vehicle. There is evidence of a large animal in a mangled mass on the road. You see antlers, it must be a deer. There are now 7 or more people around you and the driver. One person pushes forward saying they are a doctor. You hear crying. More than one person is on the phone calling this in.

After 2 hours, you are back in your vehicle, driving to … where are you going? You can’t go to work like this. OH NO! WORK! You immediately call your boss to tell them what just happened. Your boss tells you to go home and take the day to rest and recover. You are in a daze. You are in the parking lot of a gas station, in your car, covered in blood. You snap out of it and drive home.

You get home, you throw the bloody clothes in a pile. You take a long shower. You feel like you cannot get the blood off. You are thinking now of what you saw. The blood. That person. How are they doing? Will they survive? That is going to be one crazy insurance claim for them to report. What are the odds of a doctor being behind you? What if that deer waited a moment? Would you be the one to have …. Would it have been me? I missed work. My sick days are limited. I had the report to finish. This is really going to mess things up at work. We are already shorthanded. I hope I can get the blood out of that shirt. That was my favorite shirt. The water is cold. I have it on HOT. How long have I been standing here?

Traumatic things happen in our lives. No matter how hard we try to convince ourselves of the contrary, we most often, NOT prepared for tragedy. It comes at us, often, out of “nowhere” as it were. Some tragedies are extremely overwhelming. Loss of a job, weather disasters, death of a loved one.

That day of the accident on the highway was traumatic. It disrupted your routine. It brought about unsettling feelings. It led to horrible nightmares. What you did not know … a mile down the highway from where the accident took place was a bridge you have crossed numerous times going to and from work each day. That day, just moments after the accident you encountered, a section of that bridge you would have crossed collapsed onto the road below it. No lives were lost from it.

..end transmission..