Blessing In Disguise

The setting sun glared down on the highway, blinding the drivers on their monotonous commute home from work. Stop and go and stop and swerve as the maniacs in their over sized suburbans weave in and out of traffic to come to an abrupt stop behind a long line of halted commuters wishing they had left work earlier to avoid the car wreck holding up traffic in the lanes ahead.
Carl balls his fists and curses the line of drivers in front of him, assigning everyone blame for his truck almost wrecking into the trash truck in front of him. As he slams on the brakes to avoid the collision, his half eaten fast food burger laying on the open, wrinkled, wrapper on his bench seat slides off into the floorboard, sprinkling lettuce and smudging mustard all over the seat and the floor mats. Carl's oversized diet soda dislodges from the cup holder, and lands in his lap upside down, shocking Carl’s system as the full, icy beverage explodes everywhere.
Carl slams his tightly closed fists repeatedly into

his steering wheel until his knuckles break open and ooze blood. His low rumbling curses erupt into severely loud expletives audible to the people in the surrounding vehicles. His face boils red and his neck protrude with large pulsing veins. He notices his vision blurring, and then it fades to nothing, before he hears the loud roar of metal crumpling under force and his body slams forward, the seat belt tightens restricting all but his head from falling limp.
There was a brief moment in the ambulance Carl remembered, it was filled with intrusive, rapid, beeps, and whales. He felt red, and saw pain. It was intensely unpleasant and he closed his eyelids tight with the hope that when he opened them he would wake in his bed from a terrible nightmare.
Some time after that tragic wreck, Carl woke groggy, in a machine filled room gagging on his dry swollen throat, so parched he could not produce saliva to swallow. In his retching and writhing his monitors triggered the nurse’s station and retrieved