Living on Main Street which is also an Oregon state highway, we occasionally get some accidents. The last bad one we had was Labor Day 2019. I remember this because it was the day before school started and several children were in the car. The person in one of the cars had to be extracted.

My neighbor is a former deputy sheriff and if they are home, they are running a police scanner. We do get a lot of sirens that come down Main Street so I can usually tell the kind of event it is by the types and numbers of vehicles that pass. There are certain trucks for vehicle crashes and different ones for fire. Occasionally I will ask him what is happening, especially if there is both police and fire involved.

Last night, I was reading the local paper and my wife was fiddling around with the TV. She kept asking me questions about what applications we needed to keep cache and we were discussing the value of why these applications were collecting data in the first place. I was looking out the window and I saw a flash.

I yelled “Holy shit, call 911. I just saw someone hit by a car”. This is the order of events. I saw a body flipping over a red car (in the forefront) while almost simultaneously a crunching thud and then a short car horn. My first thought was why would someone honk after the person got hit? My wife ran outside and as she was doing so she said “get the first aid kit”.

Trying to process all the things going on I ran into the bathroom. I was looking at band aids and spare toothbrushes thinking none of this is going to help. Meanwhile, I called 911 since my wife ran out the door and was talking with the operator so I was less focused on finding first aid and more on answering the questions.

After the short conversation I grabbed some tape and what I thought were square bandages. I later realized that it was a box of alcohol wipes when I went to put them away. I felt completely inadequate and left the stuff on the dining room table to go outside to see if there was anything better to do. My wife wanted a space blanket so I went to go get that hoping the ambulance would be there soon.

We live about half a mile from the fire station and we have occasionally have called 911. Usually, the service is pretty fast. But, the ten minutes that it took was an eternity. The kid that was hit was a teenager, he was in my son’s grade school class so we recognized him. It looked like a broken arm and leg, at least it was not worse.

Apparently, he was crossing the crosswalk (white pickup to the left) and the driver didn’t see him. Since I didn’t see the entire event, I speculate that the farther red car had stopped and the pedestrian started walking. By the time it was all over, the victim ended up just to the left of the red cars.

I could go on and on but the morale of the story is that I felt completely unprepared and useless. I probably should have a trauma kit by the front door with things appropriate like gloves, space blankets, quick clot, medical tape etc. I think that if I was confident I could respond appropriately, I wouldn’t waffle around looking to be helpful because I wasted all of my initiative trying to figure out what was useful.

End Your Programming Routine: One time I was first on the scene when a co-worker cut his fingers off on the table saw. I didn’t handle that situation very well either. But, I like to think that I learned a lot of things I would do differently for the next time and feel a lot more confident about how I would conduct myself. Fortunately, there has not been a next time. Let’s hope that this is the only time I witness a pedestrian tumbling over a car. But, I will do better if it happens again.