On February 20, 2008, I was run over while crossing the street and dragged more than 30 feet down the road. It hurt a lot. I got better.
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Ten years ago tonight, I was recovering from the first of two surgeries needed to reconstruct my right leg after I was struck and dragged down the road by an Access-a-Ride van. (For more on that story, see here and here.) The first surgery installed a titanium rod and pins to hold my splintered femur together, but it would take a second surgery to close the leg up, and a third to replace my powdered collar bones. Until then, I was one big open wound.
"The story goes
Or the way that I was told
There was a king that always felt too high
And then he fell too low
And so he called
All the wise men to the hall
And he begged them for a gift
To end the rises and the falls
But here's the thing:
They came back with a ring
It was simple and was plainly
Unbefitting of a king
Engraved in black
Well, it had no front or back
But there were words around the band that said:
'Just know, this too shall pass.'"
—Danny Schmidt, "This Too Shall Pass"
I remember everything except the moment of impact. It was a clear, cold morning, and I was walking past the playground of my old elementary school—a simple paved lot that's served as the blank canvas for a million ephemeral, adolescent dramas. I was on my way to catch the bus to get to class at Fordham, where we'd be studying the legal framework of the U.S. Constitution, a 220-year-old document enshrining certain bedrock principles that 20-year-old me thought were inviolable, no matter who was in charge.
Things get a little hazier from the time I got to the corner. I saw the Access-a-Ride out of the corner of my eye as I began to cross. I saw it driving through the red light, coming at me fast enough that I knew it couldn't stop in time. I waved my arms to get the driver's attention. And then—
No pain. Not at first. Just gray. A gray blur, and a deafening grinding noise, as if I'd fallen between the gears of an enormous machine. It could have lasted a few seconds or a century. I had no sense of where I was or what had happened to me. And I thought that would be the end.
But then the gray grinding stopped, and there was light: the daylight shining under the wheel well, where I was stuck beneath the van, broken and bloody, cold and burning. I couldn't move. My leg and shoulder were broken. My hand and my back were melting. And despite everything, I was alive.
"Oh, shit," I thought. "Oh, shit," said the driver, as he got out of the van and looked under the wheels.
You know the rest of the story. (If you don't, I've written it down here: http://vanniversary.tumblr.com/…/77238328827/he-heard-a-dump Or I'll tell it to you if it's late enough and I've had a couple of drinks. You probably can't stop me.)
As of today, it's been nine years since the accident. My life has changed in countless ways since then, mostly for the better. Sometimes people ask me if I learned anything from the experience. The flippant answer is that traffic lights won't save you.
The real answer is that everything can change on a dime. When I thought it was over, my biggest regrets were the goodbyes I wouldn't get to say. All this — the life you love, the people you love, can slip through your hands before you even realize you're losing your grip.
Hold fast to them. Let your friends and family know they matter. There are things we don't get through or get over. But anything we can get through, we get through together.
And if you see an Access-a-Ride drive by, shout something nasty at it.
Eight years ago tonight, I was recovering from the first of the three surgeries I would ultimately need to mend my injuries after being hit and dragged down the road by an Access-a-Ride van. The right half of my face was scraped raw, tar and gravel embedded so deep in my skin that I gained a permanent tattoo. My right eye was swollen shut and my right ear was almost severed. My clavicles were powder. My right shoulder was broken and immobilized. I was covered in full-thickness burns. And my right leg was badly broken in two places.
So I had... most of my left arm and leg. And my brain. Always my brain. I hadn't let myself lose consciousness while I was trapped under the Access-a-Ride, hadn't closed my eyes until the anesthesia put me under. I was so tired. But despite the tremendous amounts of morphine coursing through my veins, I couldn't sleep much that first night, or many nights after. When I slept, I would slip immediately into nightmares—a stampede of white horses coming to trample me. And when I startled awake, the physical jolt meant every break and burn would make itself known with new intensity. I was a prisoner in my own body, and the escape of rest had become a self-inflicted torture technique.
I don't write these things to feel sorry for myself. I write them as a reminder of how much I have to be grateful for. I sit here now with my feet up on my coffee table, my amazing and devoted fiancee watching murder mysteries beside me, and two strange but cuddly cats curled up nearby. The hospital room seems very far away. I still have trouble sleeping, though I've put the horses out to pasture. And I still have my aches and pains, and the scar on my forehead that marks me as the Boy Who Lived. But I did live.
My Vanniversary, despite the gallows humor in its name, isn't a memorial to the pain and suffering I experienced on one terrible day in 2008. It's a celebration of all the amazing things that have happened since then and all the blessings I continue to enjoy every day. My flesh and bone have mended themselves, but the armor I built around my heart and soul as a younger man was irreparably damaged that day, and I've gladly chosen to leave those parts of myself defenseless.
None of us will ever know what's around the next corner—whether this day ends in our bed or someone else's bed or a hospital bed, whether that guy in the van is going to pump the gas or the brakes. But whatever this sweet, sad, funny, and infuriating adventure has in store, I'm glad to be taking the journey—and I'm grateful for the incredible people who have joined me on the road. Come on. We've got the walk sign, and places to go.
Readers, allow me to lead you back through the mists of time and memory to the morning of February 20, 2008. The place was New York City, specifically the borough of Staten Island, where I grew up and spent most of the first 26 years of my life. The weather was crisp, but the sky was clear and sunny. It was shaping up to be a pretty nice day, aside from the fact that I was just about to get run over.
Readers, allow me to lead you back through the mists of time and memory to the morning of February 20, 2008. The place was New York City, specifically the borough of Staten Island, where I grew up and spent most of the first 26 years of my life. The weather was crisp, but the sky was clear and sunny. It was shaping up to be a pretty nice day, aside from the fact that I was just about to get run over.
It was the spring semester of my junior year at Fordham University, and I was on my way to class at the Lincoln Center campus. Because I don't drive and because I was living on Staten Island, which has not yet acquired the advanced transportation technology your kind call "the Sub-way," that meant walking from my house to the express bus stop six blocks away. Along the way, I had to cross a poorly marked service road and an expressway on-ramp. Through no fault of my own, this particular attempt ended in abject failure.
As I approached the service road crosswalk, the sign said "Don't Walk," so I didn't. At the same time, an Access-a-Ride van was approaching the intersection from the opposite direction.
Let me pause here for a moment instead of barreling forward into the pedestrian that is your comprehension of this story. Access-a-Ride, for those who don't know, is a shuttle service for the physically disabled. It's operated by the MTA but contracted out to private providers. If you're from the New York City area, you may be familiar with their TV ads, which emphasize that they're always looking for new drivers. This story may help you understand why.
By the time this Access-a-Ride reached the intersection, it had a red light and I had the Walk sign. Only one of us obeyed the traffic signals we were given, and [SPOILERS] it wasn't the Access-a-Ride driver.
As I stepped into the crosswalk, the Access-a-Ride powered around the corner. I knew I wouldn't have enough time to get out of the way, so I started waving my arms to get the driver to stop. He did not.
The next thing I experienced was a gray blur and a loud grinding noise. When it stopped, I was lying on my stomach in the road, pinned beneath the van with my head facing toward the curb. My first thought was, "I'm alive!" My second was, and I'm paraphrasing here, "Ahhhhhhh!"
This was an unfamiliar experience for me, as I'm sure it is for most of you reading this, so I decided it would be best to take a methodical approach. I carefully moved all my limbs to make sure they were still attached and functioning. Left arm: check. Right arm: check, but painful. Left leg: check. Right leg: ...Hmmm. I could move it, but it felt numb and wet. I filed that under “stuff to worry about later” and started shouting for help.
In his official accident report, the Access-a-Ride driver would claim that: a) he believed he had the right of way because he saw a “streaky green arrow” (note: this is not a thing); and b) he was not aware that he had hit someone until another driver rolled down his window and told him. He wrote that he “heard a loud DUMP” and was forced to pull over “for there was a person wedge [sic] beneath my wheel.” By that point, he had dragged me 30 yards down the road, leaving a large bloody streak across the asphalt.
The driver got out of the van without turning the engine off, which contributed to the full-thickness burns that wound up covering my back, parts of my left arm, and the back of my head as my jacket and gloves melted onto my body.
The driver looked under the van and said, and I quote, “Oh, shit.” Finally, something we could agree on. I told him my name and asked him to call my mother and an ambulance, not necessarily in that order. Then the waiting began.
I’m not sure exactly how long it took for emergency services to arrive, but it felt like an eternity. I remember thinking that if I was going to die, my greatest regrets were not being able to say goodbye to my family and friends, not getting to finish my degree, and never getting to find out how Lost would end. In retrospect, the last part might have been a blessing.
At this point, I had lost quite a lot of blood and felt very tired and very cold, but I was determined not to lose consciousness, since I was afraid I might not wake up again if I did.
Finally, I heard the sounds of sirens and helicopters. The road was blocked off, and the paramedics got to work. I asked the first one who got to me whether I was going to die. He asked me, “Can you tell what color my hair is?” From my vantage point, I could only see his shoes. “If you can’t answer my question, I can’t answer yours,” he told me. It was a fair point, but I wasn’t really in the mood for his cold Vulcan logic. In fact, a bald-faced lie would have sufficed.
They lifted the Access-a-Ride van off the ground and dragged me out from under it onto a stretcher, loading me into the back of an ambulance. Now that I was out from under the van, I could feel every injury I had, and let me tell you: it straight-up sucked. When we got to the emergency room, the doctor asked if I had any medical conditions they should know about. “Yes,” I said. “I got run over. Can I please have some pain medication?”
My full list of injuries was as impressive as it was excruciating. My right leg had suffered a compound fracture. (Note: that’s the one where your bone sticks straight out of your skin. Unsightly!) My right shoulder was broken, as were both my collarbones. The right side of my face had been scraped open, permanently embedding gravel in my skin. My right ear was almost hanging off. The burns on my back went straight through my muscles, and my left hand was seared. The exhaust fumes from the van had lowered my blood oxygen and impaired my breathing. And to top it all off, I lost two pints of blood and needed a transfusion.
My injuries required three surgeries. The first two were to weld my leg together with a steel rod and then to close the leg wound, which were both such big jobs that they couldn't be done all in one go. The third surgery was to fuse my collarbones back together with titanium. Ordinarily, collarbone fractures are allowed to heal on their own, but my surgeon had never seen collarbones as badly broken as mine, and the gaps in the remaining bone were so large that they never would have closed on their own. He decided to operate after presenting the case to a group of his peers and essentially asking, "Any ideas?"
About that pain medication I asked for: The first kind they gave me had a rare side effect of amplifying pain, and when I complained that I was experiencing this, I was accused of being a lying drug addict. (Eventually, I convinced them to give me a sweet, sweet morphine pump.) That wasn't my only hospital horror story; there was also the time I woke up during surgery because my breathing had stopped and was told I had made it all up, or the time one of the trainee nurses passed out at the sight of my burns and had to be caught by my mother. Oh, speaking of my mother, how could I forget the time the hospital tricked her into thinking I was dead? You know, typical hospital stuff. But that's another story.
After two awful weeks, I was finally sent home to spend the next few months recovering in a hospital bed that was moved into my living room. For a while, I had to have a nursing aide help me if I wanted to do little things like eat or go to the bathroom. I couldn't even sit up straight without my damaged leg swelling up like one of Popeye's arms and turning a vivid shade of purple. Eventually, with extensive and painful physical therapy, I graduated to sleeping in a normal bed and using a wheelchair, then a walker, and then a cane. Not coincidentally, I developed a lasting appreciation for curb cut-outs. I went back to school that September, which was probably poor judgment on my part.
At this point, you may wonder: what excuse could Access-a-Ride have possibly offered for this accident? How does one defend the indefensible, even with the considerable legal resources of the MTA at one's disposal? Well, when asking me to sign a liability waiver while I was doped up in the emergency room didn't pan out, they had to get creative. The scenario they posited was that I was in such a mad rush to get to the bus stop that morning that I had actually run into the side of the Access-a-Ride at such incredible speed that I was sucked underneath. Their evidence: I was wearing a blue sweater at the time of the accident, and there was a blue smudge left on the door of the van.
It's now been six years since the accident, and I've more or less made a full recovery. I still have the scars, the limp, and sporadic post-traumatic stress disorder freak-outs to remind me of the accident, but I generally try not to live in fear. Instead, each February 20, I celebrate my Vanniversary, marking the day that I survived a close encounter with the world’s most aggressive handicapped transportation marketing campaign. Join me, won't you?
Price never lost consciousness during his excruciating ordeal. Trapped beneath the bus, he could see his blood on the street, but couldn't feel his right leg, which had suffered a compound fracture.
"My greatest fear was I was going to die or lose my leg," he said.
Price credits the firefighters and paramedics who raised the bus, pulled him out and tended to his severe wounds. He spent two weeks in the hospital, underwent three surgeries, then spent four months at home in bed.
STATEN ISLAND (WABC) -- One person was struck by an Access-A-Ride van in the Castleton Corners section of Staten Island this morning.
Eyewitness News is told the victim, a man, was struck and dragged by the van down Slosson Avenue just before 11 a.m.
Newscopter-7 was over the scene while he had to be extricated from under the van.
He was taken to nearby Richmond University Medical Center in unknown condition.
The driver of the Access-A-Ride van was being treated. No charges were immediately filed.
A pedestrian was struck by an Access-a-Ride bus and dragged approximately 35 feet this morning in the Castleton Corners section of Staten Island.
The pedestrian, a 20-year-old male, was hit at the intersection of Slosson and Reon avenues.
Blood was visible on the pavement, and, according to reports from the scene, bones could be seen sticking out of the pedestrian's legs. His injuries, however, are not believed to be life threatening.
He was taken to Richmond University Medical Center in West Brighton, according to officials at the scene.
His identity and condition are unknown at this time.
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