lucky stars

i switch my phone to silent at night, we've established that already.

so when i woke up at the ungodly hour of 5.30 this morning and had a few text messages and emails waiting, nothing was unusual.

until i saw one from my sister that said, simply: "juan was in a motorcycle accident." that's it. no further information, no missed calls, no voicemails, nothing.

juan is her boyfriend, and as they've been together for so long, part of our family.

i waited for an hour before calling her, scared of whatever news she'd give me about him. and her! was she on the motorcycle, too?

she answered groggily, as to be expected, at 6.30, and answered my barrage of questions. is he okay? is he in the hospital? what's broken? is he living?!

the answer to the last one, thankfully, was yes. but he is badly injured: a broken hand, a broken arm, a broken shoulder and two fractured vertebrae. he's home from the hospital, doped up on all kinds of pain medication.

i know i haven't mentioned it, but juan recently got an apartment sort-of with my sister. she lives there about half of the week, and spends the other half of the week at my parent's house. dog duties and all, her reason being. anyway, my parents weren't thrilled with her "moving in" with him, but at least she's there with him now -- the guy can't get himself out of bed to use the bathroom because of his neck/back brace. he'll be out of work for at least a week, which is huge because he works as a bartender. the good news is that he works for my company, so he'll obviously get all the time he needs to recover.

so the accident. this was his first time on a motorcycle and he was just cruising down the street in his neighborhood. my sister and juan's brother were waiting for him back at the house, when after several minutes juan didn't return. juan's brother went to go see what happened, and raced back and told my sister to get in the car. come to find out what happened was that someone ran a stop sign and plowed into juan and kept driving. that's right, it was a hit-and-run. juan was thrown from the bike, and into the fence of a church. that it was a church doesn't escape me.

the bike, of course, is totaled. it was juan's brother's, new and less than a month old. sounds painful, but not as painful as juan's injuries. thankfully, he was wearing a helmet.