I was at work in my restaurant out on Long Island yesterday night, and everything was peaceful. It was about 10:30, and a small group of customers (a man and two ladies) had just paid and were getting up to leave. The gentleman was about 65, a big charmer, and was joking with me as he got up to leave.
Moments later, I heard a high-pitched screaming. I ran out the front door and skidded to a stop as I saw the man sprawled in the middle of the road, with the two ladies in hysterics. Running back inside, I grabbed my cell phone and called 911, then ran outside again and knelt in the road beside him. I gave our address and said, “Come quick, please, he’s bleeding from his head!”
Blood was everywhere. It was leaking from the man’s head like nothing I’ve ever seen. Impossibly, he was moaning and trying to sit up – I can only assume we have some kind of primitive instinct to try and crawl to safety when we’re badly injured. I grabbed his hand and begged him to stop moving, scared that he would hurt himself worse. I kept thinking, Please please don’t die on me. Please please. After I finished the 911 call, I frantically called my ex who’s an EMT (the same one who I’ve mentioned before, the former firefighter) and he sped towards us – later, my ex told me that I freaked him out so bad that he thought I had been hit by the car and was laying on the pavement, somehow talking to him on the phone. By this point a crowd was forming around the scene.
The man who’d hit my customer stopped and staggered over to us (to his credit, he did not speed away). I was told later that the driver’s car was right there with the windshield all smashed in, but I didn’t even notice it. I barely remember anything other than my badly injured customer and the blood oozing from his head. After what felt like an eternity (but was probably 5 minutes) flashing lights heralded the arrival of an ambulance. I crawled backward so they could get to the injured man.
The two ladies were crying and clinging to each other. I wrapped my arms around them, telling them it would be okay now that the EMTs were here, and that the injured man was talking. We clung to each other until the cops approached them, wanting to know what happened. Since I did not witness the incident myself (only immediately before and immediately after) I left and went back inside my restaurant to scrub my hands and arms down.
The ambulance sped away and then the police came in and took my statement. I was shaking and so shocked that my other friend, E, had to come and pick me up. I ended up sleeping on his couch because I was too freaked out to go home alone. I had terrible nightmares about my customer and the accident all night. Today, I went back to work and heard from a friend-of-a-friend kind of deal that my injured customer has a fractured skull but he’s expected to live.
I think I have some trauma from all this. I keep flashing back to what happened and getting a little freaked out all over again. I was TERRIFIED that that man was gonna die in my arms.
