Donna came on and talked a couple minutes about how she and her husband were out drinking and how they had a fight over whether she was sober enough to drive home. She hung her head as she told how on the way home she lost control of the car and hit a truck head on.

“We were still arguing ten seconds before the impact. I remember waking up in the hospital. I tried to move my arms. The right one was in a long arm cast and the left was wrapped in a bandage. I looked at it and knew. I was a nurse in an ER with a promising career, twenty five years old when it happened. I lost my nursing license. I did two years in prison for negligent homicide. My husband died in the hospital a couple hours after the crash. I didn’t wake up for nearly three days. I have pictures of the funeral. I lost my left arm above the elbow and my right leg below the knee. Note I didn’t call it an accident. It was a crash that was inevitable. We were getting drunk like that several nights a week and driving home. By the time I got my right arm out of the cast six weeks after the crash I was already learning to use the hook. My stump was healed enough to handle the appliance in less than three weeks. A week after the crash they had me up walking with the temporary appliance. That is another term for a peg leg. I still have it, I wear it any time I want something light. I have replaced the plaster socket with one of fiberglass. With only one arm crutches are difficult for me so I wear the peg a lot. I like it better than anything else. And I never got a cosmetic hand. I don’t want one. I don’t want to lie to people, to try to convince them I am what I am not. When I got out of prison my first job was selling hamburgers at McDonalds.”

She shared a few more minutes then Susan got up and shared a little. When she finished she pointed out the various movie names and then declared the signing session open.

Donna was flabbergasted that people wanted her autograph. One of the women asked her if they would be doing a movie about her. She said they would. The woman asked the name she replied, “Widowhood and Amputation, Self Inflicted.”