As she gazed at the open highway ahead, all Linda Mousseau could think about was her promise to her son.
With dusk settling in on this autumn day, she was on schedule to meet her self-imposed deadline to be back home in Snow Lake.
“I needed to be home by 7:30 to kiss my son goodnight,” Mousseau, now 53, recalls.
“When I tell my son I’m going to do something, I’m there, so I had to be on time.”
But Mousseau, who was travelling alone, would not be on time this night. In a matter of seconds, she would be lucky just to be alive.
Mousseau was about 30 minutes into the two-hour drive to Snow Lake from Flin Flon, where she had spent the afternoon grocery shopping and running errands.
Just ahead of her, about four kilometres north of Cranberry Portage, a moose and its calf were crossing the quiet highway.
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In a split-second, Mousseau had to calculate her best chance of survival. She swerved into the opposite lane of traffic to avoid the animals.
“I was hoping to maintain control of the car. Well, I didn’t,” she says.
The sudden sharp turn at highway speed sent Mousseau’s tiny car flipping sideways several times.
She was ejected from the vehicle, apparently through the driver’s side window. In the process, her left arm was cut clear off at the elbow.
Mousseau was thrown about 150 metres from the car. When authorities arrived, they thought the passengers may have fled the scene until someone spotted her severed arm on the ground.
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If there can be such a thing as luck in this situation, Mousseau had it. Her unconscious body had landed sideways on a patch of mud with her bleeding arm stump to the ground.
“The ground was just cold enough to hinder my blood flow,” she says.
At least a half-hour passed between the accident and the RCMP’s discovery of Mousseau. By then she was clinically dead.
Not only had she lost an arm, but both of her lungs had collapsed. She had broken 16 bones, including two skull fractures, five vertebrae and both shoulders, and would need her spleen removed.
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Up until that night five years ago, life had been pretty good to Mousseau.
Originally from the Saint Boniface ward of Winnipeg, she was raised in a Cree-French family.
Mousseau worked a range of jobs, but by the time she was 40 she wanted a bona fide career. She enrolled in college to become a computer repair specialist.
She had hoped to have a family of her own by that point. She had spent 17 years trying to get pregnant, to no avail.
Then, while a student, Mother Nature gave Mousseau reason to take a pregnancy test. When it came back positive, she was elated.
She was 41 when her son was born. Winnipeg wasn’t the right place for her to raise a child, so she picked up and moved north to Flin Flon, where she had family.
Mousseau volunteered at the Salvation Army Thrift Store, taking over as the paid manager in 2003. Ever-friendly, she also worked at Eddie’s Family Foods and Extra Foods.
In 2008 Mousseau decided to try her hand at entrepreneurship, relocating to Snow Lake to open a restaurant.
When the business didn’t pan out, she began thinking about other career options. Then Oct. 29, 2008 happened.
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The prognosis was poor when Mousseau was rushed to the Flin Flon General Hospital and later, in the wee hours of the morning, flown to Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre.
“None of the doctors expected me to live that night,” she says.
Mousseau would spend three and a half weeks in a coma – some of which was natural, some of which was induced.
When she came too, Mousseau’s existence was dominated by one word: “Painful.” No one, least of all her, knew to what extent she could recover.
As days turned into weeks, she underwent a diverse and increasingly challenging rehabilitation program to restore her physical and mental faculties.
“For each injury, they transfer you to a different place,” Mousseau notes.
After four and a half months in hospital, all Mousseau could do was wiggle one of her fingers and the only thing that came out of her mouth was pure gibberish.
Miraculously, by the six-month point she was ready to leave the hospital. In fact, she felt like she had no choice.
“I was going nuts in the hospital,” Mousseau says. “I couldn’t sleep. People were crying all the time, it never stopped. I was going crazy.”
Mousseau received a discharge on the condition that she continue to go to daily rehab for amputees for the next three months. She found a temporary apartment in Winnipeg and followed her doctor’s orders.
By the summer of 2009, nine months after the accident, Mousseau was ready to return north – but not to Snow Lake.
Using insurance money, she purchased a home in Flin Flon that had been in her family for 50 years.
In rehab, Mousseau had heard some of the other amputees declare that they would have to sell their homes when they left the hospital.
She never bought into such defeatism. She knew she would maintain her independence.
But Mousseau also knew that things would never be the same.
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For Mousseau, there is no point on dwelling on the past. Still, there is much about the accident that she will never know.
The police told her that she was not wearing her seatbelt at the time, but she can’t understand why she would make such a risky decision.
“I find that so unusual,” Mousseau says. “I’m a single mother of a little boy.”
She guesses that she might have dropped her cigarette lighter on the car floor and unbuckled herself to retrieve it.
Then there’s the matter of Mousseau’s severed arm. Her insurance adjuster tells her there is no record of what happened to it, and whether any effort was made, or could be made, to reattach it.
How does that make her feel? “Awkward and very uncomfortable,” she says.
What Mousseau does know is that her love for her young son saved her life.
“I believe I had a near-death experience while I was in the hospital,” she says. “I believe I had the ability to either live or die that first night, but the only thing that came through my mind was, ‘Oh my goodness, I’ve got a little boy, he needs his mother.’ And that’s what made me survive.”
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Today, five years after the accident, Mousseau has learned to live within new boundaries.
Her brain has not fully recovered, as she sometimes has trouble thinking of the right word to say. At other times, her speech will halt.
Mousseau has had to give up former passions like playing the guitar, sewing and beadwork, but is also looking at how she might resume fishing and driving.
She still gets very self-conscious about her missing limb, particularly in social situations.
“People just automatically stare at me because I’m different,” Mousseau says.
Mousseau’s real arm may be gone, but in the near future she expects to receive a high-tech myoelectric prosthesis. Unlike her current artificial arm, it will come with a strap to ensure it doesn’t slip off.
She still struggles with brief but frightening flashbacks of the two moose on the highway, the possible result of lingering post-traumatic stress disorder.
Mousseau copes well with the flashbacks. In fact, she defiantly refuses to let any challenge stemming from the accident hold her back.
“I will try anything,” she says. “It’s funny about the human condition, I don’t know, but we have got this wonderful ability to adapt. And I have adapted.”
Adds Mousseau: “I manage quite well. I just have to do things a bit differently and with patience, but with perseverance I manage.”
