Run Over

Have you ever felt like you have been run over by a truck? I bet you haven’t. I have been. I do not mean that figuratively. I actually got run over. To add insult to injury it was my own vehicle and I was the one steering it. We were pushing the vehicle and I fell. The front driver’s side tire rolled over me. Fortunately for me it only broke eight ribs.

Sometimes my mind rebels at the thought that I almost died. It is a difficult thing to think about. How do you come to grips with the fact that you almost killed yourself by accident? My brain chooses to ignore this information most of the time. Sometimes though, I harbor a morbid desire to see the accident for myself, to prove to myself that it was a real thing. The accident occurred in the parking lot of a restaurant so I know that video of it exists. I do not have the courage to ask to watch it. So my brain imagines what it must have looked like.

In my dreams I see things from a detached, third person point of view. I am unable to speak or move as if I am the camera merely recording the event. I see me fall down. I watch as the truck rolls up the center of my body. I flail my arms and legs and scream as the tire begins to roll over me. I can tell that my organs are being displaced and squashed. The tire reaches my breastbone and pulverizes it. What is left of my ribs puncture my lungs. Unable to breathe, I stop screaming but continue to flail. The tire passes over my head crushing my skull into the pavement. I stop moving altogether. I am dead. At least, I am pretty sure I am dead. I am freed from my paralysis and move to get a closer look. This is when I awake every time, disoriented and usually sweaty.

My actual memories of the accident are much less dramatic. Mundane, really. I remember trying to get into the truck so I could steer better while the others pushed. I know it is cliché, but everything seemed to happen in slow motion after that. I fell backwards and hit my head on the pavement. Not very hard, but hard enough to give me an abrasion through my hair. Then the truck tire is on my right leg at the thigh just a few inches from the centerline of my body. I tried to scramble away from it, but it is exceeding difficult to move when a four thousand pound vehicle has you pinned to the ground. The truck rolled up my right side fracturing ribs 2, 6 – 8, and breaking ribs 3, 4, and 5. I watched as the tire got closer to my face. As the tire reached the apex of my chest my brain rebelled. Fear gripped me. Fear that the tire was going to stop rolling. Fear that the truck was going to rest atop me. At that instant I did not want to die. At that instant I prayed that the tire would keep rolling.

It did. It rolled toward my face. My entire vision was filled with the tread from the tire as it loomed over me. I tried to move, but all I could do was jerk my head to the left. I am not even sure that I had time to actually move, I just know that was my intent. Then blackness as I closed my eyes just before the tire reached my head. My life did not flash before my eyes as others have claimed. Perhaps that is an indication that my life isn’t worth remembering. Perhaps my mind was so preoccupied with the prospect of dying that it simply refused to think about anything else. Perhaps I was so scared that I simply was unable to think. Then it was over.

I felt the pressure of the tire leave my body. I opened my eyes and got up off the ground. I know, right? I just got run over and the first thing I do is stand up. I tried telling everyone around that I was fine, but no one was listening. They made me lie back down until the ambulance arrived. That is when the pain arrived. I could feel fire inside me on the right side of my chest. I closed my eyes and did not open them again until I was in the hospital.