elderly driving
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
At lunch time today, I saw something really horrible.
I was just coming down the stairs in the Loblaw's across from where I work when I heard a loud scream. Not a terrified scream, or an angry/insane "street crazy" scream, but the sound of a woman in pain. It was coming from the parking garage of the grocery store, so I hurried in that direction (I never even stop to think about these things, it occurs to me now).
And there, to my utter amazement, was a woman whose foot had been run over by a car with Florida plates. She was, in fact, still pinned. She was, of course, screaming in pain and thrashing around. As I watched (hand over my mouth, uselessly gaping), the driver eased the car off of the woman's foot. The forward motion on her foot caused the woman to topple forward, and she hit the pavement.
I rushed forward, and was the third person to get to the stricken woman. I could see that quite a bit of skin had been stripped from the woman's foot, which was also mis-shapen, swollen and discoloured. The victim was wordlessly moaning and howling, and lying face down.
One fellow placed a comforting hand on her, but she didn't seem to respond. A woman on the scene called 911. I looked at the driver, who emerged from her car after a lengthy pause, and saw that it was an elderly woman who seemed fairly aloof about goings-on.
She told me, "I saw her... I saw her and she turned like this, then...." Her she mimed a pirouette with her hands, and added a shrug. She stared down at the stricken woman, not saying or doing anything.
The useful fellow on the scene begain collecting some bags of soil for the injured woman to rest her foot on, and got some bags of her to rest her head. She didn't respond at all except for wordless cries.
I went a grabbed a deck chair, and suggested to the fellow that we get the woman into the chair. He told me no, and that the woman would have to keep her foot raised.
Meanwhile, the woman speaking with the emergency services people was saying, "no, it's inside the building...". It seemed that she was having a hard time describing the location of the incident to them.
Looking about wildly for something to do, I decided that I could be most useful by flagging down the EMS when they arrived. So I ran out to the street, and waited for an ambulance.
It was a fire truck that arrived first, and I was able to point out where the woman was. They hustled off, and I did the same while a succession of cops and paramedics arrived.
Then I remembered my teleconference and booted it across the street to my desk. I whipped off an email to the fellow in Chicago who I was to talk to, and ran back out.
When I got back, all of the EMS folks had left except for a lone cop, who sat in his car while the Florida-plated car remained where it had been. The driver, looking bored, sat in the deck chair I'd brought over.
I gave my number and a statement to the cop, and went back to the office, a bit rattled.