So there's this story I've been meaning to tell...

So last weekend started on sort of a sour note.

My best friend Katie called me at around 4 p.m. on Friday, crying. She told me, "Hey, Em. I just got a phone call from Nick (her boyfriend). He got hit and run over by an oil tanker while he was on his bike and he's in the hospital."

Wait, what?

That was about all we knew at that point. After trying to calm Katie down, I called up Andrew, who is one of Nick's closest friends, to try and get him down to the hospital. Katie was coming from Boston, Nick's family was all out of RI, and I figured Nick would want someone with him in a possibly scary time.

A few hours later I found out that Nick was OK, relatively, with no internal, head or spinal damage, just a crushed pelvis. Everyone, obviously, was relieved.

I went down to RI to visit him on Sunday and hear his tale. 

He was riding his bike out of Edgewood into Providence in the clearly marked bike lane. He's an avid bikerider, and if there was a stronger word for avid, I would use it. He rides his bike EVERYWHERE. Just want to stress he's not an amateur.

He came up to a stoplight that had just turned from green to red, so he was kind of in a cruise, but hadn't fully stopped. As he moved forward, so did the oil tanker, which did not, according to Nick, have its right turn blinker on.

Well, the tanker turned right, and Nick struggled to stop quickly. He couldn't, and skidded, sliding under the middle of the truck. He described it as a "nightmare."

Two sets of the back wheels went over his side, from his belly button to right above his knees. That's right TWO SETS of wheels, which are double wheels anyway.

Nick said he went into shock, but he was definitely in pain. He didn't know at that point what exactly was wrong but was fearfully it was possibly something life threatening. 

People jumped out of their cars, there were witnesses, and he said it was like a movie, people yelling, "Dude, you're gonna live. Stay awake!" The ambulances were on the scene within minutes and he was at the hospital shortly. It took several hours to determine what was wrong exactly, the concern was mostly over internal bleeding. Fortunately, there was none. And no other broken bones other than his pelvis. Nick will have surgery today to put pins in.

His recovery will be extensive and painful, I'm sure. But he's so so lucky. 

*****

The EMT that was on the scene apparently has his own blog: http://rescuing-providence.blogspot.com/  where he details his point of view on Nick's accident. It's a pretty great read. (September 12).