I Got Hit By A Car
It was around 7:20 pm in Bay View on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007. The lateness of the #15 bus had thwarted my best efforts at making the opening night of the new Allegro show on time. I was waiting for a bus on the East Side for about an hour. Good thing I left two hours before the show started. It meant that I was only going to be fifteen minutes late. I made a call and some exceedingly nice people offered to pick me up and bring me to the show from what was going to be the Southeast corner of KK and Oklahoma. I had begun to cross Oklahoma from the Northeast corner.It was a green light and I was walking the cross walk under the authority of a walk signal. I had crossed the Westbound lane and made it roughly halfway across the Eastbound lane when I noticed that my feet weren’t underneath me anymore. They were straight ahead of me traveling eastbound quite quickly with the rest of my body. I then noticed a tremendous pain in my lower back as I hit the street on it. It took me quite some time to realize that I was swearing. Not at anyone or anything in particular. Just in general. I was walking towards the corner I was trying to get to in the first place when I noticed that there was a man walking towards me. Then a thought occurred to me that seemed rather important: I Had Been Hit By A Car. The gentleman who was asking me if I was okay had been behind the wheel of that car when it hit me. I don’t recall answering his question directly. I hadn’t quite gotten through the swearing part of Getting Hit By A Car. The gentleman, no doubt, took this and the fact that I was walking around to mean that I wasn’t hurt too badly. He went on to discuss other things.
“I didn’t see you standing there,” he said. This seemed hideously manipulative to me at the time. To me, it seemed to suggest that, seeing as how there couldn’t have been any witnesses to the accident, it was my word against his and as far as he was concerned he wasn’t at fault because I was standing still in the middle of the intersection wen he hit me. I would come to realize later when my head had cleared enough from the accident that this guy was probably pretty guileless about the whole thing. He took that left turn at what was a very irresponsible speed and probably wasn't paying much attention to any pedestrian who might’ve been in his path. He wouldn’t have seen me until he hit me going far faster than I was. It would’ve appeared to him like I was standing still in comparison.
I did the only natural thing I could do at that point: stand there swearing and feeling a tremendous pain in my lower back as I waited for people to pick me up and take me to the show. It occurs to me that I probably didn’t tell the gentleman who had hit me why I was simply standing there. He continued to make certain I was okay and, as far as I could make out at the time, ensure that I thought he was not at fault. A small car began to pull up to where we were standing. The gentleman asked me if it was someone I knew. I answered in all honesty that I wasn’t sure, which probably sounded kind of weird to him at the time. The woman behind the wheel of the small car identified herself as a nurse. She asked me if I had hit my head. She asked me if I was feeling any numbness in my limbs. My reply to her question sounded perfectly natural to me, but again, probably sounded a bit strange to the both of them coming from a guy who just Got Hit By A Car.
“No,” I said to the nurse, “neurologically I’m fine. I just have this tremendous pain in my lower back.” That’s often the way I talk. The nurse and the guy who hit me with his car stood there in awkward silence for a moment. This guy had just related to me the insane notion that I was standing still in the middle of an intersection in Bay View and suddenly I was the one who was crazy. The nurse drove off. Moments later, people had come to take me to the show.
“Is your friend coming with you?” One of them asked as I got into the vehicle.
“No,” I said, “He’s just some guy who hit me. With his car.” There was a brief discussion. It was decided that I would be fine to make it to the show. I went to the emergency room with my wife later on that night. Surprisingly, everything was fine and I'm well on my way to recovery. I even made it to three more shows this past weekend. Not without considerable pain and stiffness in my lower back, however. That’s because I Got Hit By A Car Thursday night.
Posted by rfindley on 02/25 at 05:08 PM