I was woken, rather abruptly in the early hours, with the vision that someone close, my daughter perhaps, and our two grandchildren, had been hurt in a near fatal car accident. Now, I do know that she drives a van, not a car. So I know that the vehicle I saw in the vision was not theirs. So whose car was it?
First Question: Was everyone alright?
Second Question: What the hell happened here?
It turns out that the female driver that caused the accident was someone who, when they see an injured animal, will stop and collect the animal and then take it to an animal rescue center so that it can get treatment.
Does this sound familiar. Are you that type of person?
This being a typical work day, both the children were strapped into their car seats and the plan today was to drop them both at the childminders and then drive to the animal center before continuing on to work.
However, what actually happened was that she had placed the injured animal in the foot well on the passenger side of the vehicle where she could keep an eye on it as she continued with her journey. As far as she could tell the animal was semi-conscious, but still breathing. It had obviously been hit by another vehicle and left for dead at the side of the road. Help would soon be administered to the injured animal, or the vet would end its suffering humanely.
The next thing that happened, however, was that the injured animal woke, leapt up onto the passenger seat and then started attacking the driver. Such was the ferocity of the attack that its teeth tore into the skin of her hand, forearm and then neck, puncturing one of the main blood vessels.
Travelling at about 60 MPH, she was able to open the drivers side window in the hope that the animal would escape, which it did.
It's amazing just how much of such an incident gets blocked, erased from the conscious memory, but is still locked in the subconscious ready to replay the incident as if on an endless loop. The unfortunate part about this is that your head does not have a STOP, PAUSE or ERASE button you can press. Basically you have to live with it.
At the time of the initial attack, the driver and children, were passing a forty-foot rig which she collided with, causing the rear wheels of the trailer to ride up the side of the car before crashing down again and ending up as the photograph clearly shows.
The car was, understandably, a write-off. Worse still was the carnage created behind the vehicle as other drivers took evasive action and created yet another, more devastating, incident, all of which could have been avoided had she chosen to leave the animal well alone and let a trained professional handle it.
But, the damage was already done. The children would be handed to a professional and placed in to care while the mother was rushed to the ER to undergo some surgery and have those wounds checked out. As a precaution she was automatically given an anti-rabies injection in the upper arm.
When you think of rabies, you naturally think of wild animals being infected. The last thing that you would see as a threat would be the family dog. That said, the tests came back positive and this meant that a further two injections would be needed, one week apart from each other.
Does you health insurance cover that? You may need to check.
The caveat here, especially where injured animals are concerned, is that you don't know what the full story is. The animal cannot speak of the pain that it's in or that it has rabies. You are not trained and, if you were, you would not place an injured animal in a car with two small children that are restrained in their seats. You would also wear protective gloves, the correct clothing and, possibly, a face guard as a precaution.