Superstar cyclist Lance Armstrong's world was famously turned upside down on Oct. 2, 1996, the day he was diagnosed with cancer. Now a survivor, he celebrates 10/2 as the moment his life changed unexpectedly for the better.
I have my own 10/2 -- as, I believe, do most of us -- on 1/26. That was the date of Super Bowl XXXVII in San Diego in 2003, which I covered as a sports columnist for the Torrance Daily Breeze. A few hours after the Tampa Bay Buccaneers turned the Oakland Raiders into twisted, total wreckage, 48-21, an uninsured drunk driver did the same to my Honda Accord.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, January 26, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 25 Editorial pages Desk 1 inches; 27 words Type of Material: Correction
Superbowl date: The headline on an Opinion article Friday about a Jan. 26, 2003, accident said the event occurred 12 years ago. It was five years ago.
Police estimated that he was flying at 65 mph on a downtown street before ramming my car as I waited to make a right-hand turn. The impact was so violent that the driver's seat was ripped off its bolts. When my wife called the towing company, she was offered condolences; the worker couldn't believe I hadn't been killed.
"You're a very lucky man," one of the police officers told me after he finished documenting the accident scene.
Lucky, indeed. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 17,602 people were killed in alcohol-related accidents in 2006, about the same number as in 2003. Last year's figures will also surely be tragically high.
Still, luck is relative. I suffered a ruptured disk in my neck and underwent a two-hour operation called an "anterior cervical discectomy and fusion five-six with iliac graft." Translation: The neurosurgeon sliced my neck open from the front, delicately removed the damaged disk between my fifth and sixth vertebrae without damaging the spinal cord, used a power saw to cut a wedge of bone from my pelvis and then shoe-horned this slice of bone between the two vertebrae to allow them to fuse together.
The surgery left a 3-inch scar running across my Adam's apple that allows me to honestly tell people who ask about it, "Oh, it's from an old Super Bowl injury." Unfortunately, I had nerve damage that proved irreversible. Now, five years later, my left thumb and fingers remain numb and slightly uncoordinated. I found that hunching over a keyboard in a cramped press box was tortuous after about an hour.
All the same, I look back on 1/26 as a blessing.
