All she wants is her front teeth
NEW CASTLE – At age 30, just about all Jodi Caldwell wants is her front teeth.
“I’m too young to go through life without teeth,” said Caldwell, who lost her four front upper teeth after an accident between the car she was driving on Rt. 42, and a deer and a motorcycle.
Jodi Caldwell, shown before the car-and-deer accident that took her teeth.
She was driving toward toward New Castle and was near the Sinking Creek Store just as it was getting dark on Dec. 15 when the deer came out into the road and in front of Warner Williams, a retired police officer on a motorcycle who was riding on Rt. 42 for the first time. He was heading toward Newport.
“I saw a headlight coming toward me and wondered if it was a motorcycle or a car with one headlight out. By the time I registered that question, the motorcycle hit the deer and flung it into my windshield, into the car,” said Caldwell, who never saw the deer up close after the accident. “It was a pretty big deer,” she remembered.
Her daughter, 8-year-old Katlyn, was in the back seat with her seatbelt on. She was not injured, “Thank God,” Caldwell exclaimed. “I always make Katlyn and my son, Isaac, who is 6, wear their seat belts,” she emphasized.
Caldwell was wearing her seat belt, too, she said. The restraint kept her being thrown out of the car during the accident, but didn’t keep Caldwell from being injured.
Williams recalled what he saw that evening:
Bent Mountain resident Warner Williams, before the accident.
“I saw a car coming, and a deer came up from the left. I was so close, I remember thinking I didn’t have time to unclench my fingers from the handlebars,” Williams recalled.
Next the motorcycle was sliding down the highway, and then the deer went through Caldwell’s windshield.
Williams, a retired Chesterfield County Police officer who lives on Bent Mountain in Roanoke County, is still recovering from multiple injuries.
“I broke my right clavicle in six places, my right scapula and got 17 breaks in my ribs.” Recently, he began using a “bone stimulator” to help speed up the regeneration of his bones, said Williams, who works part time from home as a financial advisor.
He knows he is lucky to be alive. “A couple of tree cutters from West Virginia who worked for Asplundh stopped and called 911,” he said. Williams was airlifted from the accident scene to the intensive care unit.
Caldwell was driving a 2002 Ford Taurus owned by her father, Melvin Hutchison. He had insurance but not full medical coverage, his daughter said, and so his insurance company won’t help her get teeth.
Neither would Williams’ insurance. “They said it was an ‘act of God,’ a deer, and just an accident,” he said in a telephone interview last month.
The impact of the accident knocked out two of Caldwell’s top teeth, and later, one on each side had to be removed, she said.
“My top lip had to be sewed back together. I had to wait until the gums healed. I’ll always have a scar across my top lip,” she said.
Just about ever since the accident, the 1999 Craig County High School graduate and her mother, Becky Hutchison, have been searching for a dentist or dental program that can help her get a partial plate or implants so she can have front teeth again.
“I took such good care of my teeth,” said Caldwell, who is still drinking from a straw while her mouth heals. “Your teeth are just something you don’t want to go without for the rest of your life.”
Caldwell doesn’t have insurance, and isn’t working right now. The Certified Nursing Assistant had been taking care of a patient who died shortly before the accident, she said. She was scheduled for a job interview days after the accident, but couldn’t talk clearly enough to be understood on the phone for the telemarketing job, Caldwell said.
Her mother has called and researched dentists and clinics that might help her daughter, with no success. Without her daughter having insurance and a job, she can’t get teeth, her mother said.
Now she’s turning to the community for help. Anyone who wants to donate money to help out Jodi Caldwell may send contributions in her name to the attention of her sister, Jessica Bradford, at Farmers & Merchants Bank, Main Street, New Castle, VA 24127, or to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Hutchison, 512 Draft Road, New Castle, VA 24127.
Williams said he had hoped his insurance company could do something for Caldwell. And he added, “I hope this newspaper article will get somebody to help pay for her dental work.”
