Don't Drowse and Drive

Another cell phone shot. Josh is on the right.

Early Friday morning my 21 year old nephew, Joshua, was driving home and fell asleep at the wheel of his Jeep. He drove straight into a large oak tree on the side of the road and is thankfully alive to tell the tale. No, there was no alcohol or drugs in his system - the hospital checked him for that. He had spent the evening tooling about with my 16 year old niece and another friend. He had just dropped off my niece at home and was looking forward to a quick rest before heading off to work at 4:30 a.m.

I went out to Long Island yesterday to visit him in the hospital and give whatever support I could to my twin brother Larry, Joshua's father. Joshua's injuries are many (a broken nose, fractured wrist and knee, bruised ribs, lacerated chin and extensive damage to his mouth which required plastic surgery and many stitches, loss of his front teeth and three others, some damage to the spleen but that is unclear just yet, scraps and scratches from crawling through the driver's side window because the doors were unusable) but in time he will heal. The further details of the damage he sustained are too nasty to get into but our family is grateful that he survived. We are told it is a miracle he walked away from the wreck and if anyone was with him they would have surely perished.

Damn.

Jack Nerad for Driving Today writes:

The U.S.
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that
approximately 100,000 police-reported crashes annually involve drowsiness and/or
fatigue as a principal causal factor. Those crashes result in an estimated 1,500
fatalities and 71,000 injuries each year, and an annual monetary loss of
approximately $12.5 billion.

It is amazing the carnage isn't worse,
considering a recent survey by Farmers Insurance. More than 10 percent of
drivers admit to having fallen asleep at the wheel, while more than 20 percent
say they have momentarily dozed while driving, according to the study of 1,024
drivers.

Referred to as "the silent killer" because it is so often
overlooked as the cause of an accident, drowsy drivings full effect is not yet
known because reporting is imprecise, police are not trained to detect
sleep-related crashes and there is no Breathalyzer-like test to determine
whether someone was driving while dangerously drowsy. Click here to read more.

I guess I have underestimated the seriousness of falling asleep while driving, as have so many others. This is hard to believe given my encounters with it.

In January 2006 I got a call from my principal telling me that the mother of a boy in my class was killed in a car accident. She was driving home from work early in the morning and her exhaustion caught up with her. She fell asleep and slammed into a wall. I attended her funeral and seeing her two young children sobbing at her casket is a sight I never want to witness again.
More recently, a friend of mine departed for home after a night of light drinking and hanging out at another friend's house. Before he left I noticed he looked tired and I thought about trying to persuade him to crash where he was but blew off my worries because they seemed overly dramatic. Well, he fell asleep while driving and ran his car off the road. The car was totaled but he was unscathed.

There have been times when I have driven in a less than alert state. In those times I usually call my friend Joy who is usually awake at all hours or I roll down my window and blast the music. Last night it took me almost five hours to get home from L.I. after I left the hospital. I was getting quite tired myself and decided that I had better stop off and grab a cup of Joe (actually, that is exactly what it is called at Burger King).

So, do me and yourself a favor. Take this seriously. Do not drive if you are tired. Stay where you are if you can or pull over and take a power nap. The link above provides some tactics to fight drowsiness.

Josh was lucky. Let's not push it.