Crash

Where to begin?

Yesterday, as I was leaving work, I got the telephone call from Jude I never wanted to get.  The kind of telephone call no man wants to get when his wife is almost seven months pregnant.

"I've been in an accident," she said.  "What!?!" I replied.  "Someone rear-ended me at the intersection of Eighth Avenue and Division Street," she said.  Jude's voice was eerily calm as a thousand terrifying images flashed through my mind.  "I'm okay and the police are on the way," she continued.

Jude being Jude, she refused to ask for an ambulance to be sent to the accident scene.  I decided it wasn't worth arguing about - mostly because I knew I couldn't change her mind - and told her stay in her vehicle and that I'd be there as quickly as I could.  I cringed as I turned on to I-65 north, toward Nashville, when I saw how much traffic was on the interstate.

I called my friend, Hal Humphreys, who lives in our neighborhood.  When I told him what had happened, he said, simply, "I'm on it."  He hung up the telephone and drove straight to the accident scene which, thankfully, is only a couple of miles from our house.  Knowing Hal would arrive before me to comfort Jude, to make sure she and our baby were all right, to insist on calling an ambulance if he thought one was needed - all of that meant the world to me.  There are friends (and family) you can count on in life when disaster strikes and there are those you simply can't count on in those types of situations.  Hal would travel to the ends of the earth, no questions asked, for me or for Jude.  That's friendship.

When I finally arrived at the accident scene, I noticed the vehicles has been moved on to Division Street, out of traffic.  I got out walked up to Jude's Honda Pilot, relieved to see there was little damage to the rear.  Hal was standing next to the driver's side door and Jude was still sitting inside.  Had her vehicle been damaged or had she been visibly injured, I might have "gone Nascar" on the college student driving the Subaru Outback that had rear-ended her and started punching him through his open window. Fortunately, he was apologetic and cooperative, which may have saved him from bodily injury.  Seriously.

After the police officer finished his report, Jude drove to the hospital and I met her there.  When the triage nurse realized she was having mild, but consistent contractions, she admitted Jude to the hospital for a 24-hour stay.  Jude was dehydrated, as well, so the nurse put her on an IV to help rehydrate her.  We anxiously watched the computer screen set up to monitor our baby's heartbeat with the fetal heart monitor attached to Jude's stomach.  We also watched with some trepidation as the graph on the computer screen showed spikes that indicated Jude was having contractions.

After I went back to the house to pick up some things for Jude, we hunkered down in our room at Baptist Hospital to stay for the night.  Our nanny and friend, Carley Meade, and her husband, Jon, stayed at our house with J.P.  Like Hal, Carley and Jon are friends we can count on, no doubt.  It was a long night, as you might imagine, and neither of us got much sleep.  Jude's nurse came into our room regularly throughout the night and, frankly, hospitals just aren't very quiet.

By this morning, the contractions had stopped or were few and far between, thank God (and I did a lot of thanking God, during the night).  Our doctor and friend, Roseann Maikis, told me she wanted Jude to stay in the hospital for 24 hours, which meant she could leave at 7 p.m. tonight.  As I write this, Jude is upstairs, asleep (probably) and glad to be home.  She's not as glad to be home as J.P. and I are to have her home.

My wife is a walking contradiction.  She's the strongest person I know, the only person I know, in fact, that I would put in my mother's class in terms of inner strength.  And that's saying something.  And, yet, she's so tender, so gentle and motherly with J.P. - it's amazing to see it.  She's a force of nature.  I love her and I don't know what I would do without her.