Trauma: March 2009

A month ago, I get rear-ended, and spend 48 hours with no food or drink in purgatory, AKA hospital. I leave with mere flesh wounds.

3 weeks ago, a guy I have met on Critical Mass has bits of his skull driven into his frontal lobe with a 40mm CS grenade in Gaza. Parts of his brain are subsequently removed.
[War: small numbers of friends dying against the backdrop of large numbers of strangers dying.]
2 weeks ago, one of my co-workers is suddenly operated on to have a tumor the size of an olive removed from her brain.
Last week my other co-worker's daughter whom I had just met was broad-sided and taken to hospital with head injuries. She is just being brought off sedation now, and is partially responsive. The vagaries of survivor's guilt play on my relationship to my own injuries, and to the fact that I had met her days before.
Today after work, I bicycled past traffic that had been standing long enough for people to be out of their cars looking for the holdup. An Alameda Co. Sheriff's deputy was stationed at each intersection as far as I could see down Mission Blvd. Minutes later, part of the 4 dead cops' funeral convoy swept through. The sheriff's shutting off traffic showed only that they were in charge, and they were unhappy. The convoy came in the opposite direction from the stopped traffic.