Bodrum is a small town in south Turkey, across from Kos, a famous Greek island. It could be named "Little Florida", as I think they are fairly similar. Families go down there with their children in the summer if they can get time off from work. Young people just go there with their friends, stay in cheap hostels, and have a great time. The summer of 1991 my family and I went down to Bodrum. My parents had rented a house in a village called Gundogan that was half an hour away from Bodrum. My father figured that we could just drive there when we wanted to, and that he and my mother could be away from the action, having a restful holiday. There were 80 houses, all built on the sea coast. Number 51, the house we rented, was one of the better houses in the area, because it happened to be closer to the sea shore.
Bodrum is the place to be if you are looking for night life. There is this long street full of bars, one after the other. People go from one bar to another and this goes on till five or six o'clock in the morning. Besides the night life, Bodrum also offers a lot of activities for young people, such as water-skiing, tennis, swimming and sailing. Unfortunately, a lot of the time young people are too intoxicated from the previous night, so they don't have the energy even to get out of bed until two in the afternoon. In this case, sports would be out of the question! That summer, a month and a half before I left for Syracuse, I invited my best friend Melis to stay with me. She decided to bring her boyfriend Selim with her. I found a hostel five minutes from my house, right on the water, with a clean room, for only six dollars a night, breakfast included. Everything was going great. Selim had a car, so my parents would let him take us out. Two days later I invited another friend of mine to Gundogan. The night my friend Muge arrived, she wanted to go to Bodrum. We had been going out every night so I didn't feel like going out again. I had just gotten into a fight with another friend, Eda. I wasn't in a good mood. I told this to my mom. She told me that it would be impolite for me not to go, so I went anyway. On our way to Bodrum from Gundogan, Selim was speeding. I didn't care. I was used to all my friends and my brother speeding all the time. Speeding, drinking and driving just went hand in hand with being young. The night started fast. We were doing shot after shot. We went to at least five different bars and kept on drinking and dancing. I tried not to drink as much as they did and slowed down when I felt I was getting drunk. Around five o'clock we decided to head back. Selim was driving, Melis sat next to him, I sat behind Selim and Muge was sitting behind Melis. The two in the front had their seat belts on. I was pretty tipsy and I did what I usually do after leaving the bars and reaching the car that would be taking me home- I fell asleep!
The roads back to my house are very twisty and if one does not know the roads well, it is very dangerous to drive fast. Before I fell asleep, I remember hearing Selim brag about how he was driving faster and faster from Gundogan to Bodrum. According to what he was saying, it was taking us only fifteen minutes rather than half an hour to get to Bodrum. This would mean we were going twice as fast. Every time I looked down the road and saw how high up we were, I got the chills just imagining what would happen if we flew off the road.
I remember being scared as he was driving, but I couldn't get myself to say "Hey! I am scared. Can you drive a little slower?" I was eighteen and I was supposed to enjoy excitement and speed at that age or else I wouldn't be "cool" like my friends. We were five minutes away from home. I must have been dead asleep because I didn't realize that the scary thought I had five minutes ago was actually now a reality. Before I knew it, we were off the road rolling down the cliff at a high speed. I had been in three other car accidents before, but I never felt as helpless as I did at that moment. There was absolutely no way I would be able to walk out of this one. I started thinking about an article I had read before in a newspaper. Did it say it was better to hold on? No. I think it was better not to hold on. I hit my head somewhere, before I could figure out what the correct answer was. I was conscious once more after that and the last words I said were, " God! I am too young to die. Please don't let me die." Later on, I found out that when the car finally stopped, it had landed upside down.
I never saw the car but everyone was shocked that we had come out alive. After a second of dead silence, everyone but myself had said a word or had made a sound to indicate they were still alive. My friends were scared. They tried to shake me and wake me up, but I couldn't move. Then they unsuccessfully searched for my pulse. The left side of my lip was ripped, the right top corner of my eye was cut, my head was down, bleeding and motionless. I obviously had blood, sand, and dirt all over me. My friends got really scared at that point and started hitting me. Having shown some sign of life, Muge ran up the hill. Luckily, there was another young kid driving back, heading home from the bars. They carried me up the hill and drove me to a clinic.
The minute I sensed my mother next to me, I woke up. My friends had called her and told her about what had happened. My father and brother were not home, so she came to the clinic alone. When I noticed her, she was fighting with some guy who was refusing to provide us with an ambulance. He was telling my mother that they only had three ambulances and that two of them were not running, therefore he needed this last one in case an "emergency" came up. Furthermore, he told my mother to drive me and my friends to this hospital that was in Izmir, two and a half hours from where we were. It was probably seven o'clock in the morning, my mom had just gotten the bad news, she was watching her daughter bleed to death, and this guy wouldn't give us the ambulance because it wasn't an "emergency". I had cracked my cranium, smashed my face, lost a lot of blood, but, according to this guy, it wasn't an emergency. Although I do not remember much, I do remember being put in a helicopter. Everyone was smiling at me, telling me everything was going to be all right. I wasn't supposed to fall asleep, so everyone asked me questions about if I remembered the times we would cut school and go to the movies and how much fun we had in high school and how much more fun we would have in our college years. They just kept on talking. Sometimes they would lose me. I wouldn't hear them, but I would just shake my head and make sure I smiled to make everyone think I was OK. I do not think the idea of falling asleep had ever sounded as great as it did at that moment. I just wanted to close my eyes and sleep.
I remember waking up in the emergency room. They thought my neck was broken so they tried not to move me around too much. They didn't know if I had a brain hemorrhage, so they were asking me questions to see if I could reply correctly. At that moment "What is your name?" would sound like the hardest question on the SAT exam. I remember the doctor asking "What is the date today?" I replied, " What kind of a question is that? Would you know the date if you were on vacation?" He laughed and said "She is OK." The funny thing was that my mother told me that I was cracking jokes left and right and always kept smiling and looking cheerful. I guess that is what they call being in shock.
My operation took three hours and the doctors had told my mom that there was 80% of a chance that I would lose sight in my right eye and that I was in a very critical situation. After two hours, a dead person with a sheet over his head was taken out from the same room I was in. My friends told me that my mom had instantly started crying and yelling out my name. I can't imagine the pain my mother must have felt at that moment when she thought I was dead. The doctor had to shake her up and tell her repeatedly that it wasn't her daughter so she could get herself together again. After the operation I was brought back to my room. I had bandages all over my face. I imagine I must have been indistinguishable from an Egyptian mummy! When they opened my eyes I realized that I had needles in my arms. When I looked up, I saw the IV tube and the blood. I remember thinking, "Uh-Oh! Now you are in big trouble!" I knew that this meant that I was not well. I called the nurse and made a deal. She told me that if I promised to eat, that she would take them off the next day. She kept her promise. That made me feel a little bit better.
Next came the big step: Unwrapping my face. The doctor did it very slowly. My dad, my mom and my friends were staring at me. They looked as if they were praying to God I wouldn't look as bad as they expected. Well, I don't think their prayers were answered. At that minute my brother walked in. I will never forget the expression he had on his face when he first saw me. I think he mumbled to himself, "I am going to kill that son of a bitch!" I imagine he meant Selim. As he entered the room he was smiling. Everything seemed normal, but I knew him too well. Something was wrong. Five minutes later, I heard the doctor whispering to my mom, "Don't let Deniz see herself in the mirror for at least a month." I knew it! Something, somehow was really not right. The minute I heard that I got up and went into the bathroom. I shut the door behind me, because I didn't want any one to see my reaction. To be honest, I was scared to see my own reaction.
As I looked up in the mirror I saw someone else staring back at me. This person was not me. It couldn't have been. The person I saw in the mirror had black stitches around her lip and next to her right eye. She also had a purple, red and black outline surrounding the stitches. I did not hide what I was feeling as I had planned to. I came out of the bathroom and burst into tears. At that minute my life was over. I didn't care what anyone else was thinking. I wasn't going to go to college; I wasn't going to do anything with myself. I yelled at my friend and told her that this was all her fault. I saw Selim crying. Actually, everyone was crying. It reminded me of a funeral. Who had just died?
Two weeks later I left the hospital and came back to Bodrum. My friendship with Selim was never the same after this accident. It wasn't because of the actual accident, as I knew that Selim had never meant to hurt me and that accidents just happened. What had hurt me most was my so-called best friend's actions after the accident. She had left for Istanbul to be with her boyfriend. She would call me twice a week to see how I was doing. Muge, who had just started becoming closer friends to me after the accident, spent all her time with me. For a month I had to sleep at a 90 degree angle to help the swelling go down. She would wake up in the middle of the night and fix my head. During all this, Selim was never there. Until then I didn't know that I had the ability to actually erase someone from my life. I guess these are the times when you realize who your real friends are.
Eda, my other best friešnd, who I was in a fight with the night of the accident, came over everyday, played cards, Scrabble, anything to help get things off my mind. She had spent nearly three hours trying to get the tangles out of my hair as it was full of soil, dirt and blood. She put all the conditioner she found and saved my hair by gently removing each strand of hair from the bird nest that had formed on my head. During all this time I just couldn't stop thinking, was there really God? Was I lucky to have been saved or was I unlucky to have been in a car accident right before leaving to go to a foreign country for college? Would I be able to deal with meeting all new people and starting a new life?
One year after my accident, I realized how much my personality had changed. Before my accident, I never appreciated what I had. Therefore I didn't see how much I had going for me at that time. I always managed to find something to complain about. For example, I looked at the relationships my friends had and wished someday I would be able to find the same happiness, but when someone started to find me attractive it would take me seconds to come up with a reason why this guy wasn't suitable for me. Looking back at this now, I can't help but think that I must have enjoyed feeling miserable somehow.
I would also always run away from things. If I had something fun I really wanted to do, I would avoid doing it by putting my work before my pleasures. I just thought I would have plenty of time in the future to do them. Now, I do what I have to do, but I definitely don't leave pleasure out of this picture. Coming so close to death has taught me that unlike what I thought in the past, I actually might not have a future to do the things I want to do.
In addition to these changes in my personality over a span of one year, my outlook on Bodrum has now changed. Somehow I have started to enjoy the nature in Bodrum more than the bars. In the morning, I can feel the sun trying to peek through my curtains, trying to tell me to get up and catch the beautiful view at seven o'clock in the morning. Birds sing and remind me that it is summer and the beginning of a new bright day. I get out of my bed, put my bathing suit on and go down to the shore. There is always a stray dog welcoming me and seagulls flying over the Mediterranean to get their breakfast. The smell of the green pine trees fills the air and I see the squirrels and the rabbits running around. The water is cold but its clearness and its blue-green color, even at 8 meters, gives me a sudden urge to dive in. Splash! Suddenly, I am awake.
Overall, I get much more pleasure out of everything I do. I have learned to appreciate and to make the best of everything I have now, instead of dwelling on what I don't have. I guess, as the old adage goes, I see the glass half full- most of the time, anyway. I love staying home at night in Bodrum, listening to the owls, watching the stars and the moon shining on the water. I love to drive and I still drink, but now I don't hesitate to say "Hey! Drive a little slower or I will get out of your car".
I believe that everyone should always be careful about this dangerous combination. I never thought that I would get in such a big car accident, but what I do know is that the consequences of those ten seconds of carelessness has affected my whole life. Although I found the courage in me to go to college exactly a month and a half after my car accident, to make great friends and to date more guys than I had in high school, I am still not over this accident. Have I become a better person after living through all this? Maybe. But did I have to live through all this to appreciate what I have? I think these things can be discovered through the regular course of life, and did not have to happen after looking death in the face. I was still a lucky one. There are thousands of others who never got the chance to wake up.