After my car accident, Mom refused to take my six-week-old baby, saying, “Your sister never has these emergencies.” She went on a Caribbean cruise. From my hospital bed, I hired care and stopped the $4,500-a-month support I had paid for nine years—$486,000. Hours later, Grandpa walked in and said…
My name is Melissa Parker, and six weeks after giving birth to my son, my car was crushed in an intersection outside Columbus, Ohio when a pickup truck sped through a red light and changed the direction of my life in a single violent second. The airbags burst open like fists of smoke, my chest slammed against the seatbelt, and the last thing I remember before the sirens was the sound of my baby crying in the back seat.
I had been driving home from my son Owen’s pediatric appointment at Riverside Community Hospital when it happened, and one moment I was thinking about diaper cream and feeding schedules while the next moment I was staring at a shattered windshield. Paramedics pulled me from the car as I tried to twist toward the back seat, begging them to check my baby first because I could not feel my legs properly and terror drowned out everything else.
At Franklin Memorial Medical Center, bright lights hovered above me while doctors spoke in calm voices that did not match the storm inside my head. A female orthopedic surgeon leaned over and said, “Melissa, you have a fractured pelvis and a torn ligament in your shoulder, and you will need several days in the hospital and strict instructions not to lift your baby for a while.”
My husband, Jacob Parker, was stuck in Denver after a blizzard grounded flights across the Midwest, and he sounded helpless and furious over the phone while promising he would get home as soon as the airport reopened. In the hallway outside my room, a nurse tried to soothe Owen in a borrowed car seat that belonged to my older sister, and his thin newborn cries pierced every fragile place inside me.
