Extensive travel was interspersed with these jobs. My first Christmas overseas was spent as a guest of the Canadian ambassador to Sweden. There were also three trips to Ireland (one of which was a month long bicycle tour), a six week bus tour of Europe, and leisurely trips around England and Scotland by car and train. An overnight visit to Wales unexpectedly occurred when a friend and I missed the turn-off to Windsor Castle.

But then it was time to come home. I wanted to go to law school, you see, and I figured I needed some studying practice. So in September of 1981 I enrolled in a Bachelor of Business Administration program prior to heading to law school.

The car accident was in December, just after Christmas exams. Icy roads sent my brother and I skidding into the path of an oncoming truck. Readers who are students will no doubt breathe a sigh a relief over the timing of my accident (after exams) but I still flunked most of the courses I was taking because they were full year credits. Nobody was worried about whether I'd get back to finishing them. It was more a question of whether I knew who anybody was, who I was, or anything about what was happening around me. A friend of mine has since said that talking to me in the various hospitals was like coming in on the middle of a conversation.

My side of the story is that I woke up in a strange but vaguely familiar place, where everyone spoke with funny accents and used different slang than what I was accustomed to. Translating the "foreign" conversation mentally required long delays before I answered anyone. Quite often I'd forget the question or the topic of conversation while playing with comparisons. For example: a sidewalk in England is referred to as pavement, so what is pavement in Canada?

I had been in a coma for two weeks and suffered twelve broken bones in the accident. Number thirteen occurred while in hospital, trying to get out of bed to go to the washroom. They had tied me down, as befits those in or recently out of a coma, but the nurse had left the knots within my reach (people just out of comas aren't expected to be able to untie them). I didn't have the strength to lower the sides of the bed so I tried to climb over. That fall, from sitting atop the bed railing onto my nose, no doubt also aggravated the Traumatic Brain Injury I had already suffered.

As a result, I didn't, and don't, remember much about my just completed first term of business courses. After I was out of the hospital some months later, a man came up to me in a restaurant and asked how I was. I had noted his approach, thinking he looked vaguely familiar. He was too well-dressed (in a suit) to be a farmer and it was the middle of the afternoon so I assumed he didn't have a job. He had to introduce himself as a professor from whom I had just taken four months of classes.

I sat out the next year of school, officially. A friend of mine who was finishing a classics degree suggested I audit (sit in on) the World Religions course she was taking. We could therefore "visit" twice a week and it would give bath my mother and me a break from each other. I quite enjoyed the classes but the textbook was an odd shape-wider than it was high-which was very tiring to read. By the time I'd finished reading a line of text I would have forgotten what the beginning of it said. With the professor's permission I wrote the final exam. He even marked it and sent me a letter saying that I'd "almost made a B." in my optimism, I took that for a B, That was just about the end of any breaks I got at that particular university.

When I started taking courses for real the next year, one professor went to great lengths to point out that I was re-admitted to the Business School as a "special case." At that time the university did not normally allow part-time students in its Business School, for any reason. This policy has since changed. That same professor (for whom I was a student assistant for three years) also had revealing remarks to make about my academic background, which was a full science program of biology, chemistry and physics in high school followed by a mathematics degree at a university. In wonder and amazement he exclaimed, "But girls aren't good in math ... or the sciences!"

I usually responded, "So? What's your point?" That he had made a sexist comment didn't occur to me until heard a student make the same comment in a lecture concerning the use of women in advertisements. Substituting the name of another minority (Blacks or Native Indians), his remarks would have been libelous. As they concerned women it was just taken as a statement of fact about "the way things are."