Like your life? Buckle up

I wonder where they are now. I wonder if they fully recovered from the physical and psychological harm left by all the things encompassed by that misleading police euphemism, “non-life-threatening injuries.”

Notice the police don’t say, “non-life-changing injuries” — these are injuries you survive, but can end up creating a very different life for you.

I know that two of them were seriously injured; young, resilient, but seriously injured just the same.

Two things brought that accident back to me: Wednesday, walking home, I passed three parked cars, all on different streets, with their driver’s seatbelts firmly buckled closed, the belts pressed back against the seat, the telltale sign of drivers who don’t wear seatbelts but don’t want to have their cars chirp at them constantly.

Then, Thursday morning, it was a news release from the RCMP. It was the kind of news release that I imagine springs from frustration, from heading out to just one too many ordinary, average car accidents that ends up being far more serious than it needs to be. “In the last 5 years, of the fatal collisions that the RCMP has responded to, approximately one third of all of the people killed were not wearing seatbelts. Many of these collisions would not have been fatal had seatbelts been worn,” it said.

The accident I’m talking about was a simple one: a fourdoor sedan off a narrow paved road, the car nose-first into the ditch and a soil embankment. Late at night — summer.

I was the first firefighter there, the first to walk around the front of the car and see two circular, head-shaped stars of shattered glass on the windshield.

Firefighters hate to find starred windshields, just like they hate finding wrecked, empty cars. Empty cars mean searching for drivers or passengers who, injured, may have wandered off. Or drivers who, not wearing seatbelts, might have been ejected from crashing vehicles and are either seriously injured nearby, or worse, pinned underneath the vehicle itself.

Starred windshields? They mean no seatbelt, and someone hitting the glass from the inside with enough unrestrained force to shatter the glass. The car stops, you don’t. Physics leads with your face, or with the top or your head, travelling at whatever speed the car was going. The windshield stops you. It almost always involves a serious injury.

There were four people in the car, which was, itself, only slightly damaged.

But this is what makes the point most clearly to me: two of the people in the car were completely uninjured. They were, in fact, the two in the front seats of the car. You have probably already guessed that I’m going to tell you that they were both wearing seatbelts.

The broken windshield? That came from the two passengers in the back seat, both of whom weren’t wearing seatbelts.

When the car hit the ditch, they came out of the back and over the front seats of the car, over their belted-in friends, and smashed into the glass.

One of the backseat passengers had a fractured skull, spinal fluid leaking from his ear. The other, a young woman, was split open right along her hairline, like a ripe peach dropped on a kitchen floor. I see her in my nightmares to this day. And those were only the injuries that were obvious in the flickering emergency lights on the side of the midnight road — who knows what turned up at the hospital.

And none of it had to happen. If everyone had belts on, we would have simply waited for a tow truck to collect a stranded and damaged car.

Those passengers?

Like I said, I wonder where they are now, and what changed for them.

And what didn’t have to change, with something as simple as the click of a seatbelt buckle.

Your car is designed to keep you safe, but only if you use every piece of its safety equipment. Seatbelts are supposed to keep you in one place, so that every other safety feature that’s engineered into a modern automobile can work in concert with what’s-supposed-to-be-stationary you.

The RCMP can tell you the blunt statistics about how many have died without seatbelts.

They could tell you far more, in much greater detail, if they wanted to.

I’ll tell you this: the difference between seatbelts and no seatbelts is striking and obvious and clear and permanent to anyone who should have been wearing one, but wasn’t.

I was the first firefighter there, the first to walk around the front of the car and see two circular, head-shaped stars of shattered glass on the windshield.