Thursday 13 May 2010

Accidents Happen

On Mother's Day we were involved in a car/motorbike accident. Luckily nobody died. We were heading off for a Mother's Day lunch and pulled over to the side of the road so Hubby could look in the boot for a missing phone. He waited at the back of the car for traffic lights etc. to change and then got back in, indicated, pulled out and there was a huge thump and the next thing I saw was a guy literally flying across my field of vision, and at the same time we felt the car go over something solid. Motorbike Guy landed and managed to pick himself straight up and fling himself onto the footpath where he collapsed, and where I got to him seconds later. Then there were police, ambulances, crowds of onlookers and my kids crying in the backseat of our car, where they were still strapped in. Utter chaos.

It's absolutely true when people say "it all happened so fast". It wasn't until later on that I was able to piece it together. I'm a slightly nervous passenger so when Hubby looks before turning, I look too (which I suspect drives him mad but that's another story). Neither of us saw this guy. We were only about 30 metres from an intersection and he wasn't there when Hubby got in, so he either came from around the corner (and was FLYING), or ran the red light (and was FLYING). (We found out later that he was meant to be at the airport by 1pm for a 3pm international flight and this happened in South Yarra at 12.40pm - fair odds he really was FLYING and I don't mean the plane type). And the thing we ran over was, luckily, the guy's bike and not the guy.

Anyway, the good news is, the paramedics didn't think there were any breaks or fractures, although he did have a laceration on his knee and shock. I rang all 4 hospitals in Melbourne later that night to see if I could track him down and he wasn't in any of them, and all of the hospitals said that probably meant he'd been seen in Emergency and then sent home with painkillers. Hubby's car ISN'T a write-off, but it's going to take a couple of weeks to repair (the bit that holds the 2 front wheel together snapped so the steering was gone). And the kids were 100% fine by the next morning.

My problem with the whole episode was that I felt that, at the end of the day, it was a genuine accident where 5 people were in the wrong place at the wrong time, 4 people were fine and one went off in an ambulance, and as a human being I should be able to make some kind of "hope you feel better soon" gesture, without any kind of finger-pointing or blame. But the reality is that I can't, and every person I mentioned this to warned me off with a different horror story of the possible resulting lawsuits, harrassment, etc. that I may face if I did this. So I did... nothing. And that's the part that bothers me the most.
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