The sled - the car - the blackness - the missing time - the close-to-death experience - the four weeks in the hospital, two comatose, two in semiconsciousness - the memories that are so vivid eight years later.

I was sledding down our front yard, when I was about to go into the road. The snow was crusted over, and when I put my feet down behind me to brake, nothing happened. A car fish-tailing down the road, with brakes screeching, could not stop because of black ice. I was helpless , it was inevitable that I was going to die. Accepting death, I closed my eyes and held my breath.

I woke up in a hospital bed, fear stricken by the image of doctors huddled around my bloodstained and unconscious body that I had witnessed just before. Later in the trauma ward, I found that this vision was that of a close-to-death experience.

I saw some people, a man and a woman, sitting beside my bed with faces stained with fear. They told me that they were my parents. When I tried to respond, meaningless groans came from my mouth. I later found out that I could not walk or even do the simplest everyday things that just weeks before I had taken for granted. Even after I regained enough strength to move, I still had to relearn how to walk, talk , everything. All I remembered of the past was the five minutes before the accident and the close-to-death experience. The reset button on my life had been pressed.

While I was in the hospital, a permanent metal plate was installed in my head to hold its shape, or what was left of it.

My life has never been quite the same since that day in early April of 1983. I am probably one of the only sixteen-year-olds with only eight years of memory.