Coverage Limits

What a fucking day.

It started beautifully. A long, real conversation with my boss about leadership. About accountability. About transparency. About expanding coverage for our team in ways that actually serve people instead of checking boxes. He said something that stuck with me: When you stop questioning yourself, that’s when you stop being a leader.

I question myself constantly. Replaying conversations. Rebuilding outcomes. Searching for better approaches. I always wonder if I’m enough. He told me that’s not weakness. That’s growth.

I trust him.

Then came PT.

Bittersweet. I like my therapist. I don’t want it to end. But medical relationships aren’t meant to last forever. We scaled back to one session a week. Soon it ends. I’ll bring her a copy of my book when it’s published. That’s how you say thank you for helping someone rebuild their body.

The afternoon was the one I’d been dreading. Settlement meeting. Which is a fancy legal way of saying: something or nothing.

I drove to Albuquerque. In my truck. Which I hate. Four wheels feel like punishment.

I rode the elevator up to the eighth floor, got ushered into a conference room, and the paralegals walked me through the numbers.

The numbers made me want to cry.

Not because they were insulting. Because they were final.

This is what four months of your life looks like on paper. This is what a traumatic brain injury, a collapsed lung, shattered bones, facial reconstruction, a damaged voice box, months of PT, and ongoing surgery plans look like when converted into columns.

Tens of thousands. Not millions.

And the only reason there’s even that is because I paid extra for underinsured motorist coverage. If I hadn’t? It would have been nothing.

Last summer I sat in a jury pool for a woman who tripped in a pothole at a restaurant. She wasn’t gravely injured. It was arguably her fault. She walked away with thirty million dollars.

Me? I won’t publish the number. But it’s not even in the same universe.

Then came the last page. The signature page.

It said I would forever waive the right to sue the person who hit me for anything related to this accident.

I froze.

My hands shook.

I thought this was between insurance companies. Between lawyers. Between policies and premiums.

But there it was. Her name. Protected.

It doesn’t matter that the full scope of the brain injury isn’t known yet. It doesn’t matter that my memory is still unreliable. It doesn’t matter that I still need facial surgery. That I need bone grafts before I can replace a tooth that was sheared out of my mouth. That my left leg still swells grotesquely compared to my right.

None of that matters.

What matters?

Coverage limits.

So someone can trip in a parking lot and receive generational wealth. But a motorcyclist can be launched into erratic cardiac rhythms, intubated, airlifted, stitched back together bone by bone, and the system shrugs and says, “Policy max.”

It isn’t about justice. It’s about contracts. And in that conference room, it came down to something or nothing. I chose something. Because something is better than nothing. But that doesn’t mean it feels fair.

I spent the evening sad. Not greedy. Not entitled. Just sad.

Sad that my life-my pain, my rebuilding, my scar tissue-gets reduced to arithmetic. Sad that the person who made a negligent U-turn gets legal insulation. Sad that lawyers have engineered a world where harm is capped by paperwork instead of proportion.

This is not justice. It’s math. And math doesn’t care whether you lived or died.