Lonny
You never realize how much a person means to you until you almost lose them....
Lonny and I had known each other for a few years and talked occasionally. He had always been there whenever I needed him, but we still kept our distance from each other. ok, actually, he knew way more about me than I knew about him, he liked keeping his feelings to himself and not opening up.
Summer 2001 had been terrible for me. Lonny knew part of it, but he never realized the full extent until several months later. He didn't realize at the time he was the one person keeping me out of depression. Well, August rolls around and Darkon is going camping for the weekend. I knew Lonny was going down, and he knew my boyfriend at the time and I were going down, we had discussed it earlier in the week.
The trip down to the campsite takes a couple of hours, down in the Shenendoah Valley, in Mount Jackson. So...we're driving down, just get off of Interstate 66 onto Interstate 81 where we hit a standstill of traffic. We start flipping around radio stations to find a local one. We find one that says how there's a big accident on Interstate 81 about 1 mile before the Mount Jackson exit (the exit we take..). It was about cleaned up at that point but they had brought in the medivac helicopter, a real mess, a car and tractor trailer. So my boyfriend and I know we're going to be in this for awhile..it's 20 miles to the exit..and traffic is NOT moving. We start wondering if it is anybody we know, knowing that about 150-200 of us are going to be passing through that area in a matter of a couple of hours time-frame.
We finally make it to the exit, after a lovely car-ride. (My boyfriend at the time and I weren't on the greatest terms at this point, and this didn't help). We pull into the campsite and a friend of mine comes running up. "Did you hear what happened to Lonny?" I'm like, no, what? He tells me Lonny was the one in the accident, along with another Darkon person, Mo. I start flipping out. I did not expect to react that way. It hit me then how much he meant to me and how much he had done for me.
So I'm flipping out. We're hearing all kinds of rumors of what kind of shape he's in. The only thing we knew definitely was his car had somehow started spinning, and he ended up with a tractor-trailor in his door. They had to medivac him out and that he was talking at the time. We had been hearing rumors that someone had died in the accident. We knew he was in pretty bad shape, and that Mo was hurt, but was going to be fine. I was also worried because he was just about healed after having ACL (knee) surgery. I was hoping his knees were ok. I also felt bad for two reasons. He was just about to take the physical test for one of the local police forces. This was going to be the second time he was about to take it, the first time didn't happen because of the knee. I also knew how much he loved his car, it was his baby, a 1996 white mustang cobra.
This is the car before the accident.
This is what is left of the cobra after the accident, after they cut off the roof to get Lonny out.
So by Saturday we had finally gotten a rough report of how he was doing..some broken ribs..a couple other broken bones...lungs punctured..some cuts and bruises..was going to be ok, eventually, all injuries above the hips. We also knew by this point that he was out of ICU and was into a normal room. I was still a wreck the whole weekend, and the boyfriend wasn't helping. He was convinced that Lonny and I liked each other, that I was cheating on him with Lonny, and a bunch of other things. Monday I go to visit Lonny in the hospital. Actual injury tally is 8 broken ribs, all on the left, broken clavical on the right, both lungs punctured with the left one deflated, sternum broken in two spots. He thought he was going to die, so did the hospital. There was a video camera in the car that got turned on during the accident, so there's audio of the rescue. You can hear Lonny saying "Get the god-d*** truck off my a**." Apparently what happened is it had been raining really hard so Lonny slowed down to change lanes, they were about a mile from the accident. He hit a patch of water and started skidding (rear-wheel drive car). Hit the guard-rail on his side, spun, and then was hit by the tractor-trailor, again on his side. The next day I'm talking with my boyfriend about how Lonny is doing, his only comment was "Why are you going to visit somebody in the hospital who only wants to get in your pants"..yeah, real nice boyfriend..like I said..we were having problems then.
After this point is when Lonny and I started to get close, I went and visited him while he was at home for about a month. We went to Maryland Ren Faire most weekends and just had a real fun time hanging out. It was about the end of ren faire season, around the end of october, that I realized that my feelings for him were changing. He realized it about a month later than I did, but he realized it..and now we're together.
