The Accident Part 2

I wanted to share this picture of the market in France to show everyone what it looked it. If you take a look some at some of the tree's in this image you will notice that some of them are very large. Over time if tree's aren't taken care of properly they get old and rotted and need to be taken down. Unfortunately for my parent's they happened to be underneath a very old and rotted tree that was not maintained properly, and they had to pay the price for someone else's lack of due diligence.
Now back to the story...

The next day I woke up and got myself ready and walked over to my parent's room. They were getting ready and so I sat down on their bed and waited. We then all proceeded downstairs to the restaurant for some breakfast. The man at the front desk could see us from down the hall, I was crying walking next to my dad helping him with his crutches, and my boyfriend standing next to my mom helping her as well. He approached us and said, "I would like to offer your family free breakfast this morning, typically it is an additional charge but after what you have been through it is the least we can do." Just that simple gesture put such a big smile on my face, the fact that someone had recognized the pain that we have been through because from the moment the accident happened till this very moment no one showed us any kind of empathy. I sat my parents down and went to get them breakfast when my mother called me over and said, "Look what my cousin from Italy just sent me." I grabbed her phone and saw that it was an article about my parents. It said that two traveler's were struck by a tree branch in a local market in Provence. I remember looking at my mom and saying, "Good there's an article about it, which means we should reach out to the government and demand some kind of compensation." I could tell my mother wanted to pursue legal action but she was in so much pain it was the last thing on her mind.

After breakfast we went outside to the pool to relax, we needed a game plan on how to move forward. We knew we had to get to Rome to board our flight in 8 days but we didn't really know my parent's condition since no one was able to explain it to them in English. All of a sudden my mother's phone rang, it was the hospital. They were trying to explain to my mother that my dad must return to the hospital as they believed that he was not properly assessed yesterday and that he could possibly have injuries he was not made aware about. They also wanted to see my mother again and do another head scan to ensure she did not have any internal bleeding. I began to panic, I said, "Why would they discharge you at 3am last night just to call you back and say they're not sure if they properly assessed you, isn't that illegal to send a patient out the door without being completely positive they are healthy to do so?" I could tell my parents were worried but they were staying quite to protect me. So off they went to the hospital, I wanted to go with them but they insisted that I stay at the hotel and try to relax, ya right. The entire time they were gone I had no contact with them, I couldn't receive any updates because only my mother's phone had service and so the entire time I was waiting all I could do was worry. After a few hours they returned and came to the pool area where my boyfriend and I were sitting. They said, "Dad has a fractured knee, a torn ACL and LCL, they wanted to cast him but we told them that we needed to be on a flight soon so we couldn't stay in France much longer. As for my mother she was fine, she was prescribed anti-blood clotting pills so when we take our flight there's less of a chance she will form a blood clot in her head. As you can imagine the horror I felt when hearing all of this.

Now that we knew their conditions and they were clear to fly we began figuring out our plan back home. We reached out to some family we had in Italy, who lived just an hour outside Rome and planned on staying there for 2 days until our AirBNB was available to us that we booked previously. We boarded a small 40 seat plane to take us from Provence to Rome, you would not believe how scared I was every time the plane made a noise. Our family was waiting for us at the airport to take us to their home. Now I can go on about the other nightmares we continued to endure during this trip, like how the insurance company called and said that based on the explanation of the accident that their doctors believed that my father was misdiagnosed and that we had to go to a hospital in Rome to be re assessed for the third time, or how my mother and I went to get ice cream for everyone after dinner and told my boyfriend and dad to go back to the AirBNB to wait and how they went to the door and got the key stuck and then broke it trying to get it out so we couldn't get back into our place or how my mother booked a cab to take us to the airport the day we had to go home and instead of telling the company we needed to be picked up at 9am they understood it as our flight was at 9am so they showed up at our place at 7am and never contacted us so we stood outside for 45 minutes trying to get a hold of the company and no one was answering until we finally realized that no one was coming. I can go on and on about how nothing could go right for us for the remainder of the trip, but that's not how I want this story to end.

Ya we endured a lifetime of pain, we had to work together as a family to get through the most terrifying experience anyone could ever go through but I want to remember the good parts of this story. Often times when we experience hardship we quickly forget the good parts of the story. So to end off I would like to share some positive images of our trip to remind myself that things happen that are out of our control and that I should not blame myself for this accident. I did not cut the tree branch down, I did not put my parents there purposely and that although this terrible thing happened, prior to this we were having a great time and we plan on redoing it someday to paint over the bad memories and make better ones.