Reassuringly, I could hear my wife arguing with one of the medics. Good, she was all right. But what happened?

The last thing I remembered was turning on my left turn signal and stopping to allow three oncoming cars to proceed past me. Then, the inside of the ambulance. In between, nothing - total blankness.

We'd driven to the grocery store, loaded up the car, then driven back home, We'd stopped at the local convenience store at Diamond Hill on the way home. After that, it was about a mile to our turn-off. It was later explained to me that someone had come flying over the little hill that precedes our turn-off, never even slowing down before they plowed into our rear bumper. Our little Corolla was slammed forward - spinning around through several full circles and into the ditch - finally coming to a stop, totaled. My wife and I were slung up against our seat belts, and our groceries were thrown out through the shattered windshield to scatter themselves across the landscape. Some of the canned goods no doubt smacked us upside the head during their brief flight to freedom.

After several hours at the hospital it was determined that my wife Lindsey was suffering from loads of bruises all over her body and some strained muscles in her neck. I had been knocked out, scratched up by broken glass, and had somehow managed to break my left clavicle. My left arm is now in a sling and ace-bandaged into immobility. Lyn is having to use one of my walking sticks when she needs to get up out of her chair.

I may be out of work for several weeks, if not months.

2007 has been a lousy year for Lyn and I. Yet... We live, we will recover, and we'll come back fighting.

"I get knocked down / But I get up again / And they're never gonna keep me down..." Words to live by? OK, beats the heck out of all the alternatives.

Senior Editor, and one-handed-typist sans peer,
Dan