November 5, 1988, a Saturday. My 12 yr old son and I were back in the timber of our property cutting firewood. My wife has gone to town to pick up our 10 yr old daughter from her mother's house (my MIL). An hour later, my cousin roars through our pasture honking his horn trying to find us. We run out and wave him to us. He lets me know that my wife has been in an accident and it isn't good. I ask a lot of questions but he doesn't have any answers. I don't know if she had already picked up the daughter or not. My son and I jump in my cousins truck and head to my wife's sister's house so I can drop off my son. We get there and she and I take her car and head to town, 15 miles away. On the way, we pass the scene of the accident. My wife's 85 Dodge Charger is in the ditch with a 3/4 ton flatbed farm truck sitting on top of it. The roof of the car is completely collapsed. I see no way that she could survive. We get to our small town hospital just as LifeWatch is leaving the helipad. I run into the Emergency room and our doctor meets me just inside. My wife was a nurse and has worked closely with him for several years. He turns me around and he and I get in his car and head for Wichita. On the way he tells me that she was alone in the car, she is unconscious but has no broken bones or visible trauma. At least my daughter is safe.
We get to the hospital and the first person that we encounter is a neurosurgeon who tells me that she is in a coma and might need immediate surgery to relieve brain swelling and I have to sign a mountain of paperwork. This begins a 3 week stay in ICU. They never have to do the surgery but she doesn't come out of the coma until almost Thanksgiving. Once she is conscious again, they are able to assess the level of TBI and set the wheels in motion for the rehab that will follow. She will spend the next 8 weeks in the rehab wing of the hospital learning to speak, walk, and feed herself. I wasn't given any set values for the functions that she would regain so I wasn't sure what our future was going to look like. I was fortunate that our kids were old enough to be able to take care of themselves and be very helpful. My folks lived in Wichita at the time so we set home away from home there. Amazingly, she was able to recover to a remarkable degree and last May we celebrated our Golden anniversary.