My Story – Trapped
"He was trapped in the car"… "They had to use the ‘jaws of life’ to cut him out". Words we hear all too often in the news – no one wants to think about what it’s really like. The "jaws of life" were a relatively new thing in ‘82, and I thank GOD above for their invention. I don’t call them "jaws of life" though… I figure when you’re at the business end of them once in your life, you get to call them what the firefighters call them – Hurst Tools. Though Hurst no longer has a monopoly, the fire station two blocks from my apt uses a japanese version of them and they claim they are much better. Last time I checked before I moved though, most companies were still using Hurst in the DC area.
Anyway… the collision was a head on offset crash – the impact was head on, passenger side to passenger side, about 2 ft into each front end. It actually ends up kind of lucky for me that the new car that Gerry’s dad bought and we DID wreck was a chevette – I know I just curled a few ears out there (don’t worry, I’m just getting started doing that 
) but the car that hit us was a chevette too, so all things were equal, and the cars crushed the exact same way. It was like taking a cereal box and turning it 45 degrees and slamming the corner into a table, so that the box crushed to form a triangle. That’s how both cars crushed too. Unfortunately for me, I was caught in that triangle.
It’s hard to paint a word picture, most attempts at doing that, people don’t understand, so I’ll try to be a little more verbose than I have in the past, talking to people. The front end on the drivers side was still pretty much in its proper position,.the headlight still intact. But from about the driver side seam of the hood all the way across the passenger side, it was pankaked flat to form a triangular shape to the front end. My guess is, the headlights on my side ended up about parallel with my knees. The frond end on that corner was compacted to about a foot and a half thick, firewall to bumper. The dash board – in it’s proper place more or less on the driver side took on that same triangle slant on my side, and the end of the dashboard was now parallel with the back of my head. I was in the seat, had very little room at all, my legs were bunched over to the center of the car, because that’s the only room there was for them – thankfully, they were not pinned in the wreckage. The forward seam of the front door was just a bit behind the back of my seat. The windshield was about 5 inches from my nose, and I was resting against the back of the seat. The tow truck driver told my dad that the car battery was a foot and a half from my nose, and it was still firmly planted in the mount.
Fair to say; that’s trapped in the car.
The collision occurred right in front of a house where a couple of cops lived, so there was competent help on the scene immediately. I was in and out of consciousness, and the extent to which I was conscious, was fraught with pain… Pain is a relative term, most people don’t understand that when I say it, but it certainly is. Every once and a while, I catch a woman saying "you men just don’t know what pain is" – that’s a perfect example of pain being relative, and I always object when they say that, it’s actually a pretty dumb thing to say in my opinion. I say pain is relative… the pain I was going through was centered in my right leg. My right femur had basically exploded in the collision, and the pain was just unbelievable. It felt like someone jabbed a hot poker in my thigh and buried it all the way to the center. I had no idea my leg was shattered at that point, but I knew it hurt. I complained a lot about it when I was conscious..
My buddy Gerry got out of the car pretty much right after the collision, and quickly fell to the ground, as his right femur was shattered too. He told me as he was laying on the pavement and people were attending to him, and he kept hearing me say "man… my leg hurts" "man.. my leg hurts". He told me he felt like saying "shut the hell up, Wilk!" 
. He was fortunate enough to not have gone through much pain, at lest that’s what he told me several times. I guess I wasn’t so lucky.
I say pain is relative because, for all I suffered – and it got worse than it was while I was trapped in the car, there are plenty of people out there that have had it SO much worse than I had it… much MUCH worse, so again, pain is relative.
I probably was conscious just seconds after the collision. I remember that beyond unbearable pain in my leg, my whole body stung, it was an odd feeling. That soon subsided though, the leg pain did not. One of my first conscious moments, I remember someone yelling in the side window, but thought it was odd that it was coming from behind me, it should have been in my left ear. He hollered "are you ok in there?" and I remember having to turn my head around to the back of the car to answer "yeah I’m ok, but my leg hurts"… again with the leg . I had to turn my head around to the back part of the car, because that’s where my passanger window was, still intact in the passanger door, which was also now behind me.
Being in and out of consciousness, I had a chance to process what had happened a little, but it hadn’t fully set in. There was one point where I remember being out… it was kind of like coming out of a deep sleep… I heard a bunch of yelling and I thought "what the hell is all the shouting about?" and silly me thought "it’s ok, you’re going to wake up in your bed tomorrow, and everything will be alright. Then I opened my eyes and saw the broken windshield right in my face, with all the red lights of the fire trucks reflecting in every broken facet of that windshield. It really set in at that point… everything was not ok, and I wouldn’t wake up in my bed tomorrow, if at all.
It’s at that point, I knew for sure I was in very serious trouble, and I had to fight. Fight with every bit of the one or two ounces of strength I had left in my body. Soon after that moment of full realization of the mess I was in, I didn’t see a thing – I’m assuming they wrapped my head early, because the right side of my face hit the windshield pretty hard, and it later took about 100 stitches to close – very small fine stitches, but a hundred none the less. I don’t remember them wrapping my head, I don’t remember any rescue worker being in the car at all at any point. Anyhow, it’s probably a good thing to some extent that I couldn’t see after that short period, because the view wasn’t all that pretty anyhow. I also sensed that they put a blanket over me, I could feel it. They did and I assume still do? to keep the glass fragments off of you when they start cutting the windshield out. and pulling the car apart with the hurst tools.
Left with no visual data, about all I had left was my hearing. I remember that one sound… that sound that everyone in that predicament heard and remembers… that low drone of the motors that power the hurst tools. Back then, they had two stroke motors and were taken off the truck and set near the car. These days they are four stroke engines and are housed in the truck itself, so they are very quiet. The make a sound like a very low throat chain saw – much lower in pitch than an actual chain saw, and it’s like someone is sitting there just tapping the trigger about every two thirds of a second and releasing. I hear that sound from the time they pulled the motors off the truck till they shut the doors on the ambulance. You don’t hear the hurst tools doing their job, they are quite silent. The only noise you hear is when they actually cut through something, and all you hear is the metal crushing. I remember telling this story to a church youth group, and one of the adult volunteers was also a volunteer fire fighter, and he helped that part of the talk by providing the sound effects for the hurst tool motors – he knew it well, every firefighter does, and everyone trapped knows it from the business end. It’s not the biggest deal, but you don’t forget that sound.
They literally had to pull the front end off of me before they bent the roof up and pulled me out. That I heard. About the only way to explain it is, bolt a car seat to a steel girder, and then bend that girder. it was a loud groaning metal sound and I could feel the car being pulled apart. When the sound stopped, I could feel that I now had a lot of room in front of me, like before the car was crushed. Just moments later, seemed like seconds, I felt a tug at my back – they had a back board on me and pulled me straight up on top of the roof and on a gurney. It was at that moment that I knew my right leg was broken in half. My right quad bent into a v shape as they pulled me up… boy… did that hurt.
Survival was all I was thinking of though. To the extent I was conscious while trapped in the car, I kept telling myself that all I had to do was get into the ambulance and everything would be alright. It’s amazing the tiny little baby steps involved in the survival instinct, but I was about as focused on that the whole time I was trapped in the car as I’ve ever been focused on anything in my life. It was an inner drive… something from within, something almost automatic.
The trauma was mostly to my leg and chest. I thank God every day that there was no head trauma. Hell, I thank God every day that he didn’t take me at that moment. I’m sure some of the rescue personnel were giving me very low odds as they pulled up on the scene, that is, if they even thought they could get a pulse, thank God, they did.
It took the brave men and women of the Damascus Rescue Squad about an hour to complete all this – Hats off guys and gals – hats off to you. You’re in my prayers every day. Thanks just doesn’t cut it, ya know?
The other thing is, and I’ve only told a couple people this in my life, again because I don’t want to be seen as some kind of nut job. There was a presence in that car. Something that’s hard to put into words, yet very real. It’s almost as if I could sense someone sitting in the back seat of the car behind the driver seat (which would make sense, because there was no room behind mine . I don’t know for sure and won’t know this side of glory what it was exactly, but I shall learn in the great by and by. It was this sense of a very pure "love" for a lack of a better term, flowing from this person, or being or entity that was quite palpable. Being Christian now, I almost dare to say that I know what God’s grace feels like. It gave me such a sense of peace in the midst of a very horrible situation. I can’t really adequately put it into words, but it was quite real. I’ve never sensed anything remotely of the sort, not even close, before or after those moments, and once I was out of the car, it was gone. My only hope was and is, that heaven or whatever your belief system is with regard to the afterlife is one one hundredth that peaceful full of grace feeling, because it truly was amazing.
BTW… the google map I said would be in today’s article will be in tomorrows… it’s more relevant to the ambulance ride, tomorrow’s subject.
[...] my one true and amazing encounter with the Living God in my story, specifically in the article I wrote about my experience of being pinned in the wreckage of my first accident (and only trauma experience), that one of the things that truly gave me the [...]