After a car crash alters Emily Winn's life forever, she must relive the trauma when she testifies in a deposition.
Emily Winn is a NSF Graduate Research Fellow and PhD candidate in the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University. Before Brown, Emily completed an AB in Mathematics at the College of the Holy Cross and spent a year in the Visiting Students Programme at St. Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford. Her research interests lie at the intersection of statistics, topological data analysis, and information theory; her current work applies theory from those fields to genomic data. Outside of school, you'll find her erging in the gym, screaming at the Red Sox game on TV, or binging the latest Netflix comedy specials. Follow her on Twitter, @EmilyTWinn13
This story originally aired on December 6, 2019 in an episode titled “Justice.”
Story Transcript
So my freshman year of college I get a phone call from my mom. And when she says, “Do you have a minute,” I realize something is up. I soon learn three things are up. One, Nana Phyllis passed away. Two, my brother is in the hospital with a collapsed lung. And three, the lawyer called. We have a case and we have a deposition in a couple of months.
I’m pissed. Are you kidding me? I've moved on. I don't want to talk about it and I don’t want to leave school, fly to Delaware and relive it under oath.
When I was 16, two weeks before my junior year of high school started, my mom, my sister and I were sitting at a red light when we were rear ended by a Mack Truck. It was pretty big - think one size down from an 18-wheeler - and its trailer was filled with food for a delivery. My mom and I sustained severe head injuries in the accident. My sister was, thankfully, uninjured. And our car got totaled. The truck driver later pled guilty to two counts of reckless driving, one for talking on his cellphone and one for speeding with an oversized load.
We consulted a lawyer when we found out that the farm had hired this truck driver knowing he had a poor driving record to see if we could file a lawsuit against that farm’s insurance company. And we were told, based on Delaware State laws, that we don’t have a case. Well, two-and-a-half years later, apparently we do.
Now, my mom assures me, “Don’t worry. The lawyer will prepare us, but in the meantime you need to list all of the bad things that happened as a result of the car accident.”
Well, that’s a depressing exercise. But it’s really easy because I’m really depressed.
So, before the car accident, I was a top student on my way to a Division I basketball scholarship. In school, I aced every course I took and I trained two to three hours a day for basketball. School and basketball were my identity and the car accident shattered that. Within a year, basketball was over and in school my grades plummeted and I had to drop some courses and make them up in summer school.
So in my 18-year-old head I have nothing. I am nothing. So I detail every expense, every painful moment after that car accident because, in some ways, I see this as an opportunity to prove what I had lost and, in doing so, prove what I was worth.
My mom and I fly to Delaware the night before the deposition. The next morning we meet with our lawyer and sort through our lists. And he goes over Delaware State law for suing a corporation. So first we have to do this deposition then we go to arbitration and attempt to settle. If we don’t settle then we go to trial.
Oh, and one more thing. In today’s deposition the opposing lawyer is going to try to provoke us to either lose our temper or contradict ourselves. His goal is to see whether or not we are sympathetic, reliable witnesses because those are the most valuable in court. So no matter what happens, we have to stay composed and we have to stick to our story.
We enter a conference room with a long table. At the head of the table sits the court reporter. My mom, our lawyer and I sit on one side and the opposing lawyer sits on the other. And my skin crawls as he insists my mom go first and I soon realize why.
He interrogates my mom over her decision to travel that day without her husband and how she could possibly claim any worth or income loss as a mere housewife. He pulls out her gynecological records from 20 years ago. He even asks her how her sex life with my dad changed after the accident.
Now, she keeps a straight face through this, as do I, but my blood is boiling with fury because this guy isn’t just questioning us. He is in intimidating us. And now it’s my turn.
Half of my brain is thinking, “Oh, my God. What does this guy have on me?” And the other half is thinking, “Bring it, jackass!”
He starts by having me relive the accident. That part is quick because my account lines up with my mom’s. He then asks if I have any lingering symptoms. I say, “Yes.”
He says, “Well, your neurologist said you shouldn’t have any more so you're contradicting a doctor.” I tell him doctors are human and sometimes humans make mistakes.
So he says, “Fine. What are your symptoms?” And I tell him about my headaches, how I’m light and noise sensitive, how I sometimes slur my speech, I sleep more than most people do, I struggle with depression and he cuts me off. He says, “You can’t cite depression. You were diagnosed with that before the accident.”
Okay, like getting hit by a truck doesn’t dampen your mood? Regardless, he was wrong. That diagnosis he was referring to was a misdiagnosis.
He continues with my medical history, which isn’t a surprise because I've had three other concussions. So when I was five., I slipped on black ice and smashed my head on a slate stair. A few hours later, when I started vomiting, my parents took me to the hospital and there a CAT scan revealed I had a fractured skull and golf ball-sized blood contusion on my parietal frontal lobe. That was physically the worst of my four brain injuries but emotionally the easiest.
I don't remember much. I remember getting get-well cards from my kindergarten classmates. I remember I couldn’t go to recess for a few months, but after that I was fine and my head didn’t hurt again until the accident.
When I was 16, this is my junior year of high school, about five months after the accident, I was in a basketball game and I took an elbow to the jaw. That concussion was easy. It only took six weeks to recover. Senior year, when I was 17, this is about a year after the car accident, I dove for a loose ball in a basketball game and I took a knee to the face. That one took three months to recover and it officially ended my basketball career.
Now, I acknowledge that both of these concussions had contributions to my long-term symptoms but the fact about concussions is the more you get, the more susceptible you are to get more. I've taken plenty of hits throughout my 12-year basketball career and none of them resulted in concussions until the car accident.
And now for his lawyer ambush, “Do you drink?”
“No.”
“Do you smoke?”
“No.”
“Then what do you do for fun?”
“I work in my school’s cafeteria and tutor children from low-income communities.”
This is where I remember, “Oh, that’s how being a dork pays off.”
He continues to attack my social life and at one point he goes, “Well, if you've never had a boyfriend, how do you have friends?”
And I explain to him that having friends and dating are, in fact, different. But deep down his words sting because I already know I’m an awkward, gangly, loud-mouthed, never-been-kissed 18-year-old woman and I really don’t appreciate his reminder of that.
He moves on to pick apart my basketball career and my scholarship prospects there. And he asks, “Are you sure you were that good?”
And I give him a confident, “Yes,” only because I'd rehearsed it ten times that morning with my lawyer.
I’m told by people who saw me play that I was good enough to play in college but I still feel like, since I never actually played in college, I failed to reach that level.
He finally pulls out my high school transcripts and he asks how much school I missed. Totaling absences, tardies and early dismissals I probably missed about a hundred days of school in my last two years of high school.
And he says, “No, you didn’t. Your transcript shows no more than 50.”
He thinks he's caught me lying, but junior year an administrator pulled me into her office and explained that when a student misses a lot of school, state law requires her to call Child Protection Services and inform them to open an investigation into the student’s family for abuse. And my heart stopped because my parents were going to be questioned by state authorities just because I couldn’t heal fast enough.
So she made me a deal. As long as I made it to school for half a day each day, she would override the rest of my absences. So from then on, only total absences were counted on my transcript.
After the deposition, my mom and I got Wawa, cheesesteaks specifically. We sat in the parking lot and we cried. We felt so violated by this lawyer’s relentless scrutiny. I mean, who was this guy to pore through our entire medical history? What did my love life have anything to do with the car accident? And why did Delaware State law force us to endure a humiliating interrogation just to seek justice? I know that lawyer was doing his job but I think we can agree he was a slimy dick.
His treatment of me wasn’t unusual, however. In high school, teachers, staff, parents, classmates all accuse me of faking my injuries for my own benefit, whether it was to skip school or miss homework assignments. One teacher even told me to drop out. Once I was no longer a top student or a star athlete, I couldn’t get good publicity for the school so, to them, I was worthless, and it didn’t matter how much proof I had.
Every day for two years I had to fight accusations that my concussions were a lazy millennial’s pathetic excuse for mediocrity. Is that different from a lawyer trying to brand me as a spoiled college drunk using concussions for free money?
It took years and a lot of therapy for me to realize that my worth is not determined by the length of a CV or the amount of money won in a lawsuit. My worth is inherent with my human dignity. My worth also shows in my resilience. I didn’t drop out of high school. I graduated on time. I went to college and now I’m doing a PhD in Applied Math.
There are days when I have to leave my office early because of a migraine. On those days when light physically hurts and it feels like someone is tightening a metal clamp around my skull, I resent my brain for being temporarily unable to work. But it’s on those days that when my phone rings and I see it’s my mom that I feel a rush of relief because I know that I’m loved no matter what my brain can do. Thank you.