My birthday last month brought on some sobering memories of the same time last year, when H. had a lucky escape from serious injury by the work van he’d been driving. Last week I was finally shown the related CCTV footage.
The video shows my husband arriving at the scene in the work van, which slips back into gear and moves off while he is jumping out. One of the bad guys is in the van’s path. It is moving slowly but the guy is so stoned he doesn’t get out of the way and is knocked backwards right out of his flip-flops. It was so oddly comical I couldn’t help but laugh – and rewind a couple of times to watch again. Apart from an impaired memory of the event (insisting he’d been run over by an ambulance) the man was completely unharmed.
The camera position didn’t show what was happening on the other side of the van – H. getting his leg jammed between the van and a fence post. About 20 minutes of footage showed crews from just about every emergency service turning up to help. Even a couple of mounted police appeared towards the end, when my husband was being hauled away on a stretcher to his waiting ambulance. Hopefully his last trip to hospital for a while.