Collision With A Twist

Whenever a car rolls over, there is a risk of serious injury. Occupants get tossed around, smashing their heads against windshields, and their chests against steering wheels and dashboards. For this reason, in Boston, paramedics are dispatched along with EMTs to all rollovers.

This one happened on Storrow Drive, the parkway that runs along the Charles River. Wreckage blocked both lanes, backing up traffic for more than a mile. It took us a while to weave through the stopped vehicles. We arrived to find two cars smashed, with two drivers standing in the breakdown lane.

Climbing down from the cab, I surveyed the damage. One car had a dent in its right rear corner. The other had been damaged on all four sides. The dents were not deep, which would have suggested severe impact, but all of the windows had blown out and the roof was dented inward. Skid marks on the asphalt led to skid marks on a concrete retaining wall. Obviously, one of the vehicles had both rolled and spun, hitting the wall and the other vehicle in the process.

Troopers were interviewing the drivers. The owner of the car with little damage denied being injured. He didn’t even want us to look at him.

The other man said his shoulder hurt.

“Your car’s pretty banged up,” I said. “How fast were you going?”

“I’m not sure,” he replied. “I stopped looking at the speedometer when it went over a hundred.”

“I’ll get the immobilization stuff,” I said to my partner. Anybody going that fast must be presumed injured until x-rays and a CT scan prove otherwise.

Soon we had him strapped to the board in the back of the ambulance. Incredibly, he didn’t have a scratch on his face. “He’s bleeding from someplace,” one of the EMTs said. “There’s blood on his pants.”

The man was cooperative but extremely hyperactive. He kept trying to sit up. As I gently pulled him back down, I saw blood on his hand. Turning it over, I saw a series of parallel slice marks on his wrist. His other wrist had similar cuts.

“Did you cut your wrists on purpose?” I asked.

“Why, yes,” he said, smiling the way some people do when they’re drunk.

“Is that why you were going so fast? Were you trying to kill yourself?”

“Yes, I was. I want to die. Will you please stick a needle in me and give me some poison?”

I shook my head and tried not to laugh. I don’t believe suicide is a funny matter, of course. But the man was acting so happy that it was hard to take him seriously.

“I’m sorry,” I finally told him. “You know, I’d really like to help you with that, but I can’t.”

“Please? I think it would be a good idea. You can do it. Just give me a needle.”

It was the strangest situation. I’ve had conversations like this with people who were weeping, but never with people who were grinning.

“When did you cut your wrists?” I asked.

“An hour ago. I’ve been very sad lately. So I smoked some marijuana, and drank some beer, and cut myself.”

“And then you drove fast.”

“Yes. And then I drove fast.”

We started toward the hospital. On the way, I started an IV. He remained strangely cooperative, not even flinching as the needle punctured his skin. There was none of the drama of the usual suicide attempt.

He remained in the hospital’s trauma room just long enough for a cursory examination. Then it was off to the CT machine for a head-to-toe internal exam.

I was just about to leave when a trooper walked in. He gathered the usual information—the name of the patient, the name of the doctor, the names of my partner and me. Then he smiled. “I feel sorry for the poor bastard in the other car,” he said.

I asked why.

“The guy was driving along, and he saw the flash of headlights in his mirror. He looked back, and there was this car, rolling end over end, catching up to him. He’s doing sixty miles an hour, and the car actually smashes into him from behind as it rolls along. Scared the shit out of him.”

I laughed. What had begun as an ordinary collision had turned into something quite bizarre.

One of the emergency department nurses made a very astute observation, though.

“This would never happen to any of us,” she said. “Only somebody trying to kill himself could hit a wall and another car at a hundred miles an hour—then walk away without even getting hurt.”