I might never have mentioned this before, but I was in a bit of a fender bender a few years back.

The company that runs tolled express lanes in the Metroplex recently had a lady who also had a bit of a fender bender tour schools and gently encourage kids not to text and drive.

The crash killed her parents and left her in the hospital with broken bones and a traumatic brain injury.

Jacy Good’s husband opened for her.

“A ten percent chance of surviving? Oh yeah, I had that,” I thought to myself.

Good explains her last memory was stopping at a gas station. She went to college in Pennsylvania, so that stop wouldn’t have even included Beaver Nuggets.

She says she couldn’t walk for three months, and even then, she could only take a couple of steps.

Our paths diverge there. I’m told my mind rebooted [there’s an outside chance “rebooted” is not the medical term] when some associates were visiting the hospital, and I confidently declared I was going to stand up and go for a walk. They tried to stop me, but when a man wants to walk, doggone it, he’s goin’ for that walk. Except when I tried to stand up, I went down like a sack of potatoes.

“This woman is bravely telling her story to try to change kids’ behavior,” I thought to myself. “Let me shove my microphone in her face.”

She talked about how the brain changes when you’re on your cell phone.

“We need to bring some levity to the situation,” the school’s administration said. “Let’s get on the PA and explain to everyone that seniors are currently in the auditorium.”

But she continued, saying an average of nine people are estimated to die in the US every day because of distracted driving, but the number may be higher because not every state reports the numbers.

Because kids are just awful, they weren’t terribly excited to pay attention when this started, so the introduction of local government officials led to a fair amount of sarcastic hooting.

I explained I would have been one of those awful hootin’ kids, but I noticed them change when they saw pictures of what happened.

They can still hoot, but maybe now they’ll hoot in support of responsible driving. Good says she goes on these speaking tours to make the consequences real.

I, meanwhile, decided to continue wrecking station cars and write blogs about this pastime.

Maybe we followed different paths, but now I mentor the traumatic brain injury survivor, helping them to become the best insubordinate nuisances to corporate hierarchies they can! One of the folks who runs the program calls us superheroes. I really think she presents a strong point.