Believe what I did not see, do not believe what I saw

That is, what the police are telling me.

I woke up in the hospital in a regular room, and was told I had been in a one car accident, less than 30 mph directly into a pole. No one else was with me.

Three days later I woke up in the ICU following a respiratory intubation and was told I was in a one car accident straight into a pole, and the other person with me fled the scene before the police arrived.

Both of the above describe the same accident.

It takes 2 weeks before I get to see the ticket. My birthday is correct, but my age is listed as 10 years older than I am. There are several other errors on the ticket.

During these two weeks I have been trying to remember where I had been and what I was doing before the accident occurred. Based on what the police said I remembered exiting the freeway and pulling up to the light. But when I see the ticket I check my Google maps to realize I had not been at that intersection, and I was headed North not west. I had been given a false memory.

The nurse sees me getting agitated and tries to calm me down. “They are just typos” he said. “Just concentrate on the one thing you do know, that you were in a car accident.”

As Betsy said afterwards, he never should have said that. Because we looked right at each other and realized we didn’t have a single bit of firsthand evidence that I had been in that accident. We did have evidence that something else probably happened.

Now, 9 months before I had been assaulted by an alleged friend. I had felt every one of the four hits with the metal rod. My wife had seen them . My son had seen them. Yet the police assured us it couldn’t have occurred. There wasn’t evidence, not even my bruises etc., To convince them to press charges.

So. I shouldn’t believe what I had seen, what I had felt, because the police said there wasn’t enough evidence, but for an event where they have given me bad data and nothing firsthand, I am to trust them to be correct and believe it had happened.

Not that I am being paranoid or a conspiracy theorist, but it is a warning to us all, what we think we know vs. what we really do know aren’t often the same, and we live way too much of our lives in illusions that make people call reality the illusion when the truth is the other way around….