Carl F. Thelin

FORGET ABOUT BEING KILLED

    

        We put too much emphasis on the number of people killed each year in motor vehicle collisions. Statistics note the typical loss of income, and other costs. The number 42,636 is in the NHTSA report for the year 2004. Many people may mourn those lost ones. But, life goes on.

            Car crashes injure many, many more people than are killed. That number is 2,788,000 - sixty-five times as many as were killed. A few of those individuals are badly burned. More suffer back injuries that render them paraplegic – wheel-chair bound. A few more have neck spinal cord damage that makes them quadriplegic – almost totally paralyzed. Others have a “closed head injury”, a fancy way of saying brain damage, making them like children forever.

            All of those still-alive victims will live with disability and probably pain. Many, probably most eventually, will be a burden on their care-givers, who might be members of the family. Some become wards of the state. The worse cases I have seen are the children who are physically or mentally dependent on their parents, who now have a lifetime burden. After that, another relative or the state must take over.