Wear your damn seatbelt. Always. Period.

TubaDad was supposed to get home from his latest business trip Wednesday at lunchtime, but Tuesday night, around 10pm, I got a phone call from him that started like this: "Hi it's me, don't freak out, I'm fine, but I'm riding in an ambulance on the way to the hospital right now..." What??!! I don't think I did so well on the "don't freak out" part.

Turns out he had been riding in a cab near the JFK airport in New York, he (stupidly) wasn't wearing a seatbelt, and the cab got in an accident. The cab was t-boned by another car, it went out of control and came to a stop when it met a telephone pole. TubaDad flew all over the back of the cab and got pretty mashed up. He ended up with bruised ribs, cuts all over, and a bone-deep gash that went from the bridge of his nose through the eyebrow and up to mid forehead.

He spent Tuesday night and most of Wednesday in the hospital, where they checked everything out thoroughly and a plastic surgeon worked on his face in the operating room to fix the severed muscle, repair (hopefully) any nerve damage, and stitch everything back together in multiple layers. He's home now, and pretty sore all over. The head damage looks much better now that it's been stitched and covered with tape, but it's starting to bruise and turn red. We'll have to see how it heals.

Well those are the facts. TubaDad asked me to post this because he says he's spent the last two days telling people what happened and frankly it would be easier to just point them to this post. And also, because we want everyone to know two things:

1. We were very lucky. Things could have been much, much worse.

2. ALWAYS wear your seatbelt. Always. It doesn't matter who's driving, how far you're going, whether you're in the front seat or the back, or whether it's "customary" not to wear seatbelts in the vehicle you're riding in (like a taxi). Buckle up—every single freaking time. Period.

Here are a few pictures to enforce the Always Wear Your Seatbelt message. Click the first two if you want to see bigger versions and all the gory details, bypass them if you're bothered by this kind of thing.




There was one little funny, courtesy of the paramedic (his response was just SO New York). After the crash, TubaDad got out of the cab and put his Blackberry down on the back seat. Minutes later, it had mysteriously "disappeared" and the cab driver was the only person who had been near it. TubaDad, the paramedics, and the policemen tried to find it, to no avail. Later, when the cab driver tried to get in the ambulance, one of the FDNY EMT paramedics said "Listen up motherf*****, when you produce his cell phone you can get in the ambulance. Otherwise you can WALK your a$$ to the f***ing hospital!" The cell phone reappeared about a minute later. Heh.