How Stupid Do You Have to Be?

This Saturday didn’t exactly go the way I’d planned – a pleasant ride on the Schuylkill River bike trail in what promised to be a beautiful day.

It ended with me getting run over by my own car.

How’d that happen? First I had to move my wife’s car so I’d be able to get mine out of the driveway. As I was backing her Rogue out, suddenly my car began beeping its horn. Somehow I’d initiated the panic alarm in my pocket. I hit the brake and pulled my Honda’s keys out and tried to disable the alarm.

Didn’t work. I figured the angle was off so I opened the Rogue’s door, got out and stopped the alarm. What I didn’t do was put the Rogue in park and it continued rolling back, and the door knocked me down.

Stupid.

Then the front tire ran over my left foot and continued rolling.

At this point, my right leg was still under the car and I began to feel pressure on my crotch. Somehow I managed to roll out from under the car as it continued past me onto my neighbor’s lawn and stopped on the slight rise though it was still on and in reverse.

Then I began cursing – a long, varied curse filled with interesting nuances as people began popping out to see what all the noise was about.

In the end there were about 6 people and one dog + a car that was driving by and stopped. Not surprisingly each, as they arrived, asked me if I was OK and what’d happened. This had a salutary effect as I stopped cursing a bloody streak and repeatedly told the story.

My next door neighbor asked me if I was alright and whether I could stand. He and a few others helped me stand up but while I could put weight on it, it hurt like the dickens. Several suggested I go to the hospital and my neighbor offered to drive me.

I thought this was a good idea but I had to explain why my own wife, Shirley, couldn’t do it.

The night had been interesting as she fell out of our sky-high bed and hit her head on the frame causing a small gash on the side of her head. I applied a cool washcloth, clearing the blood (surprisingly not very much) and assessed the damage not to be severe enough for stitches and/or a trip to the emergency room.

She tends to sleep in anyway but I doubted she would be in condition to drive me so I took my neighbor up on his offer to drive me – in the Rogue since it had to be removed from the lawn anyway. I told him he didn’t need to wait as my wife could pick me up later or – at worst, I could take an Uber home.

Once in the hospital – about 10 minutes away – I repeated the story for the umpteenth time – and a few moments later was ushered in to an exam room. Shortly, a nurse came in and asked for the story – again! – and proceeded to order an x-ray even though he doubted my foot was broken based on my being able to push against his hand.

After the x-ray, done with a self powered, mobile unit, about 10 minutes later he returned with the good news: I “had lucked out. Nothing broken or torn,” just an abrasion in the side of the arch where my sock had been ground into my foot as the tire rolled over it.

He put a band-aide over the abrasion, put on an Ace bandage and gave me some meds for any pain that might develop.

I called Shirley to come and get me and then I was home with amazingly little pain. As you can see from the picture, 24 hours later the foot doesn’t even LOOK bad. I’ve had sprains that were uglier.

Moral of the story, if there is even one? NEVER get out of a car with the car in gear.

But we all know that, don’t we?

One question still reverberates in my mind: what if I’d not been able to roll out of the way of that tire? Would it have rolled over my crotch and how badly would I have ended up – JUST because I was stupid?