Most of my posts I have tried to keep lighthearted and more on the positive side due to my desire to not be one of those negative, life sucks sort of person. Today I will break that streak because my stomach is just one big ball of anxiety and stress.
About 4 years ago yesterday my daughter and I witnessed an ugly thing. I went to the school to pick her and her friend up because there was an event they had to attend a little later. I worked a few miles from her school. On our way back to where I worked, traffic was moving at a snails pace in our lane, buses were everywhere and kids were walking along the trail next to the road.
As we were creeping along, there were a couple of boys that had left the trail and started towards the road. Laughing and shoving eachother they kept getting closer to the road and proceeded to walk into our lane of traffic without even so much as a look at the line of cars. The one came out in front of another car that was directly behind a bus while the other did this but quickly went back to the shoulder. The one who had come into the road had no regard for the traffic, as if he thought that the cars would see him and automatically stopped which they did.
However, one last look back at his friend, a smile and a wave off to his other friend and this kid took off towards the other side of the road. Remember now that he was directly behind that bus. I looked at the lane of oncoming traffic and there were a line of cars coming but there was just no way this kid had seen that because he was completely oblivious to the large objects that surrounded him. I was two cars behind that bus. He got roughly 3 running steps out into the lane of oncoming traffic and WHAM! The car hit him square on at a good speed and launched him a good 40 feet and he landed in the ditch. He was on the other side directly lined up with my drivers side door. His shoe landed roughly 80 feet from the point of impact after his body hit the ground.
Now, the cars in front of me continued to go, I wanted to go so badly because I have anxiety while driving as it is and my heart was hurting it was beating so hard. I sat there a moment and said, "Oh my God" while my daughter and her friend said the same almost in unison. I had to pull over, I had to make sure he was ok. I had first aid training, I knew CPR, I had to go.
I pulled to the side of the road and demanded that my daughter and her friend stay! I didn't want them to see this poor boy. I leapt out of my van and my focus was getting to this child whose friend was already there on his knees trying to wake him. I had tunnel vision while running across that road and almost got myself hit by another car. I remember standing in the middle of the oncoming traffic lane and holding up my hand at this car and being in shock because I couldn't believe that no one else had pulled over to help!
I reached this boy and saw him and knew that he was dying. All my functions and abilities to help suddenly were blank in my head. I couldn't remember anything, I just squatted down next to this kid and rubbed his head. He wasn't breathing and his poor little friend was trying desparately to wake him up. I told him not to move him at all in case he had a neck injury. I tried to pull the boy away and send him some feet away because he had seen it from moment one.
Another man came and him and I tried to figure out what to do. He knew CPR but there was shallow breathing so that wasn't necessary. The man wanted to roll him onto his back but I freaked because you never move an injured victim unless there is support for his neck.
I was absolutely no help what so ever. I couldn't touch him, he had blood coming from his ears, his nose, and his mouth and I couldn't....I felt so useless and wondered what I was doing there. Then a woman showed up and asked what needed to be done and we explained that we wanted to move him and that his head needed to be stable. She bent down and put her hands underneath his head and we proceeded to gently roll him to his back. I laid my jacket on him to keep him warm but knew that there was nothing more that we could do. He had too many internal injuries and a head injury that we were not capable of fixing.
As I stood there, I was talking to a woman. A woman who was in her early to mid 50's. We were talking about how the poor driver of this car had simply had no time to react and she looked at me and said, "I'm the one who hit him". I embraced her so tightly and told her that it wasn't her fault, there was no time for her to even react because he darted out almost immediately on her bumper. She was on her way home from work in the cities and she still had a good 40 minutes to drive to get home. She was in shock. She was numb. She was blankly watching all the hubbub around this boy. I felt so bad for both of them, this was an accident and made me realize just how immortal children think they are.
I had to give my witness report to the trooper and waited for a long time to do this it seemed but once the cops arrived and the ambulance we were all told to go wait in our vehicles. I went back to my van and my daughter and her friend were in shock, shaking, and very sad. There was a school bus pulled over behind me and a couple of other vehicles. The school bus was full of children of course.
As I sat there, a woman walked up to the van and her and I began to talk. She worked at the school. At one point, she held up her hands and wondered if I might know where she could get a rag to wipe off her hands. She was the one who had been holding this boys head. I had wipes in my van and helped her to clean up with shaking hands. We discussed the accident and all the adults who had seen what happened agreed that this child was not using his head, wasn't using a crosswalk and this poor unsuspecting woman would have to live with this for the rest of her life. It was just sad all around.
The cops made me pull my van to a side road to get off the busy road, and finally I was able to give my statement. The trooper reiterated that there was nothing this woman could do, that the boy was most likely in the wrong and that this boy had done a stupid thing that would ultimately end his life.
The boy died 2 days later after they took him off life support. He was really messed up. Grief counselors were aplenty at the middle school, and ugly rumors were flying around about this woman who had killed their friend. My focus was not on myself at the time, I hadn't cried or dealt with my emotions at all because I was so worried about my daughter and her friend seeing such a horrible thing and then having to go to school and be surrounded by more grief. I picked her up early on the first day after the accident and her and I talked alot during school hours the next couple of days--she would call me to see how I was doing. It was like a morgue in that school building for about a week.
That is when things got really ugly in our house...
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