MS Head Trauma and Spacetime Parallel Universe

Some things you just can't get out of your mind. After reading about quantum physics, multiverse, time warps, black holes, rifts in time, and Newton's apple falling on Einstein's head, no answer is satisfying my head trauma accident from a summer day in 1967 Indiana.

If you are aware of any of the theories mentioned above, keep them in mind as you read what happened, if you are not aware, then just scratch your head with me, pick your brain, noodle on the facts I'll present.

After my 10th birthday I was allowed to ride my bike alone to the park. The park was "Packard Park" and it was about 10 blocks from my home. On a perfectly normal summer day in Fort Wayne, Indiana, I put on my new yellow windbreaker (with a hood that rolled up and zipped shut to form a collar, plus a side arm pocket where I kept that dime my mother always told me to "keep in case you need to call home in an emergency"--I loved that windbreaker), hopped on my fairly new red Schwinn bike and headed off to the park. This was not my first trip there. It was a terrific park located across from an ice cream shop, a grocery store (Roger's), and it had the perfect basketball court. Usually I walked, bouncing my ball all the way, but not on that day.

I rode up to the one major street on my route. It ran between the ice cream shop, park, and the grocery. There was a gas station on my side of the street and I cut through. The distance between the entrance to the gas station and the curb was just a few feet. It was a quiet morning, no one up and about yet, no kids in the the park. It was still cool, that's why I wore my windbreaker. I got to the streets edge, the curb to my right, and looked both ways back and forth---absolutely nothing and no one as far as my eyes could see, which is very far down an Indiana, flat, city street. Off I went.

The next thing I remember was seeing an old, paint splattered, pick-up truck with a ladder on the side, coming to a stop about the middle of the block where the grocery was. Three high school aged boys were sitting on and jumping down from a yellow Goodwill dumpster at the corner nearest me in the empty grocery parking lot. The boys were shouting, "Stop!" and "Hey! You hit a kid!" Then I saw a thin man jump out of his pick-up on the driver's side, and look back at me.

The next thing I remember is walking next to my bike towards home and a man from the gas station came up to me. "Where are you going?" he asked nicely. "Home," I responded mater-of-factly. "Why don't you come and sit down for a minute, " he said as he gently put his arm on me and guided me inside the gas station where I sat down. The quiet of the morning seemed broken and I could hear sirens getting louder.

One of Ft. Wayne's largest hospitals was a block away and a police car pulled up near the door to the station. I heard the station attendant tell the policemen, "That guy hit her and just kept going. She said she was walking home." Then one of the policemen (and I LOVED policemen) asked me my name, while his buddy was speaking on his walkie talkie. "Diane Standiford. I was going to the park, but I think I should go home." "Will you come with us to the hospital first? Let's go this way." The nice policeman was leading me to his car. I thought, "Wow. I get to ride in a police car!?" Then I saw the face of the painter. He looked so scared. He looked shaken. I felt bad for him. "My bike..." The policeman said, "We'll get your bike. It's okay."

After I got in the car, it was starting to make sense. That painter must have hit me with his truck. But I felt fine. He looked so sad. Then the siren went on. JOY! But, wait, we were only a block from Lutheran Hospital. I pondered why that was necessary, but it sure was fun.

At the hospital the police and doctor types were huddled, while some nurses lifted me to a bed and TOOK MY WINDBREAKER. "I have a dime in there!" (I never saw the windbreaker, they pulled it off from behind.) They were nice enough to give me my dime, which I held tight in my hand...until I had returned home hours later.

They didn't want me to see that jacket because it was drenched in blood. I never saw a drop of blood, but my mom did and I guess it was every where on my backside. I take that back: There was blood spots on my smashed bike and on the curb, or what was left of the curb, my head had taken off a good chunk of cement. After we got home, there was still some caked blood in my hair. My mom was called, surgery to stitch my cut was done, the painter never paid anything, though he offered to. In later years my mom would be criticized for not taking money from him, but she would say that she felt sorry for him. (And I felt the same, except I thought I should have gotten a new bike. Aunt Vi probably bought me one.)

Here is the black hole, parallel universes, spacetime, part: NOBODY saw me or the painter until moments after the impact. I looked both ways, no trees, nothing to block my view, so clear and LONG was the area that there is no way imaginable a pick-up could have been upon me. Since my left side of body didn't even have a scratch, it would seem my bike hit his pick-up, tossing me back.

The gas station attendant saw nothing, yet he told police he had been looking out the window. The three boys saw nothing until a bright yellow jacket on a bright red bike fell down hard as a pick-up passed by. They would report that they never saw me coming and never saw the pick-up approaching, yet they were facing that very direction!

The painter also said he never saw me at all. He was not speeding, in fact, he couldn't have been going very fast, and he reported his speed as "about 20 MPH." (This was the first time since my birth announcement that my name would be in our local newspaper!)

This accident might have been a blip on my life screen had I not started seeing 'stars' whenever the injured part of my head was touched with any force. (Like tumbling in gym class, which a doctor wrote off as my not wanting to go to gym.) A blip, had my leg not moved during a walk home from school around age 11.

And the all-time Blip killer: Multiple sclerosis symptoms non-stop from age 20 through now. (age 54) Once I saw my MRI in 1990 and right under the scar on my head from that 'blip'---well there it was, a huge MS plaque, size of my palm.

Now, here is my question: What was the constant? Me? The teen boys? The gas station man? The painter's pick-up? The ice cream shop? We all saw the ice cream shop. That is about the only thing we all saw from our vantage points. But like the wind, we all felt the same breeze, saw the leaves waving, yet, like the wind, it can't really be seen.

First I thought *I* wasn't there before. Nobody saw me. But then I thought it was the painter, since nobody saw him either. (Oh, and the gas station attendant and teen boys saw each other before the event.) Soooo...the painter and I met in an instant. A moment so brief that it could not even be seen.

Did the universe split for an instant? Is there another Diane who made it to the park? And if so, what made the split? Is it just the fact that so many people were looking right at the split that makes it so questionably? Might these happen often and go 'unnoticed'? I mean, many things happen to us when no one is around. The painter would have said, as we have all heard before, "I never saw her." And I would have been dismissed as a kid who didn't look both ways and a vehicle hit me. End of stories.

But this? Because of this I will continue to read about time warps, spacetime, in relativistic theories and hypothetical meta-universe conversations. Something that can not be explained happened to all of us at the scene that day in Indiana. Something that would turn my life upside down, down, down, forever. (Or, until another split turns me up.)