Joanne Greene: How Getting Hit By a Car Saved My Life

Sometimes a horrible incident can bring unexpected positive change. Joanne Greene tells us her story.

I’m five steps into the crosswalk in broad daylight, then POW, I’m thrown onto the hood of the grey sedan looking directly at the driver’s panicked face through the windshield.

What the hell? Stop the car! I silently scream for hours, or maybe ten seconds. And then, in an eerie moment of silence, I am on the ground. In the middle of the street. Alive.

The next five days in the hospital featured four pelvic fractures and uncontrolled internal bleeding. Plummeting vital signs. Relentless pain, the ambulance ride. Twisted metal. People screaming.

Back home with a hospital bed and a wheelchair, I was helpless. This person who’d been in constant motion, never leaving the dancefloor, known for multi-tasking, and always fully in charge was felled. Stopped dead in her tracks. Fully dependent on others for eating, going to the bathroom, and getting relief from the incessant, debilitating, mind numbing pain of crushed tissue, broken bones, and traumatic flashbacks.

From day one a mantra popped into my head, the voice of a wise inner gremlin. “I can do this,” the voice said. And soon I was saying it. Sometimes saying or doing leads to believing.

Over the weeks and months, I learned how to not move, to stare at the leaves falling off trees, to say I was tired when friends asked too many questions, to turn inward and get comfortable with all that I’d been racing to obscure–-loneliness, a need to accomplish, a desire to fit in.

Now, more than a decade later and fully healed, I can hardly remember the motor than ran my life before the accident. My pace has slowed somewhat, allowing me to hear beautiful sounds and see tiny miracles I might have missed.

Thanks to having been hit by a car as a pedestrian, I’ve learned to let go of the illusion of control. In accepting my fragility, I discovered stillness, and found greater power, peace, and firmer ground.

With a Perspective, I’m Joanne Greene.

Joanne Greene is a news anchor, host of the podcast “In This Story…with Joanne Greene,” and the author of a new memoir, By Accident: A Memoir of Letting Go. She lives in Marin County with her husband.