My birthday last month brought back some sobering memories of the same time the year before, when my husband had a very lucky escape from serious injury at work. Last week I finally saw the CCTV footage.
The video shows him arriving in a work van, which somehow slips back into gear as he is getting out and starts moving on its own.
One of the offenders is directly in its path. The van is moving slowly, but he is so impaired that he does not get out of the way and is knocked backwards clean out of his flip-flops.
It was such an oddly comic moment that, despite the circumstances, I laughed – and may have rewound it more than once.
Fortunately, he was unharmed, apart from later insisting that he had been run over by an ambulance.
What the camera did not show was the other side of the van, where my husband had his leg pinned between the vehicle and a fence post.
The next twenty minutes brought what seemed like every emergency service in the district. By the end, even mounted police had appeared, just as my husband was being taken away on a stretcher to the waiting ambulance.
Watching it now, the funny parts are still funny.
But mostly I am reminded how much worse it could have been.