By Emmanuel Fashakin
A 57-year-old man came in this morning came in for medical clearance for a cataract operation. His cataract is irrelevant to our discussion. I noticed that this man has a limp with a crooked back and I asked him for the cause of his disability. “I got run over by a dead man and almost got killed.” “You what?”, I asked incredulously. “Yeah, you heard me right. A dead man almost killed me.”
Our friend was riding his bike merrily on a beautiful Saturday night in South Jamaica, Queens County in New York City when, without warning, he got hit from behind and got swept into the gutter. Police and ambulances were summoned. Unable to move due to his extensive injuries, he was shocked when he saw policemen approach him yelling: “Put your hands up where we can see them! where is the gun? etc. He tried to raise his arms but couldn’t. He was a moment away from being riddled with a hail of bullets. Someone sensed that he was injured and approached him cautiously. He was immediately cuffed.
Why all this drama? It turned out that the guy driving the car which swept him off the road was a dead man. This man was in a nightclub in South Jamaica, and as he made for his car, got shot in the abdomen. He managed to open his car and yanked the door open, started the engine, and raced down the street in an effort to escape his assailants. Down the road, with the car still speeding, the guy succumbed to his injuries and died behind the steering. The car swerved and hit the guy riding his bike innocently. He escaped death twice that night: first from the dead man’s car, and then from the police who are quite trigger-happy in New York. The cops saw that the driver had been shot, and concluded, wrongly, that our man had shot him!
After recovering from the shock of my patient’s misadventure, I noticed that he is a smoker and still actively smoking. He survived the horrific injuries he sustained from being hit by a dead man’s car, including a broken back and a ruined hip. They have had to do a right hip replacement on him twice: first a hemiarthroplasty, then they said, the hell with it and replaced the whole hip. I him: “you escaped death twice in one night, and now you are trying to kill yourself from smoking.” “I have more lives than a cat,” he replied me cheerfully. “I know,” answered him back, “you have nine lives, but you have used eight of them, only one remains!”
Emmanuel O. Fashakin, M.D.,FMCS(Nig), FWACS, FRCS(Ed), FAAFP, Esq.
Attorney at Law & Medical Director,
Abbydek Family Medical Practice, P.C.
web address: http://www.abbydek.com
Cell phone: +1-347-217-6175
“Primum non nocere”
