The Road Roller Incident
Some industrial road rollers, used to construct roads and highways, weigh more than 25 short tons (about 22,679 kg). If you happened to look at one and you see it functioning then no matter how much of a positive hearted pure soul you are, you will at least once think about a human getting rolled flat under it. Thanks to our Disney mate's famous show The Road Runner where the supposedly clever fox gets run over by similar fast moving vehicles and gets flattened out. But because he is a character they can wake him up the next second. Humans however have bones and artilleries filled with blood.
I once visited an institute for the "specially abled" for a school project where I happened to be able to interview this guy who lost his legs to a road roller incident.
What he said to me was morbid to say the least. Here's what he shared with me in his own words -
I used to work for the Road Construction Association under a government funded project where we were supposed to level NH 8 for about 15 miles starting at Anand going towards Ahmedabad Toll Naka. The entire project was government funded and so the equipment was (how do I put this lightly) shitty. I was the team leader for a team of 12 workers. 5 hours into the project everyone was bathing in sweat. The heat was most times upto 48-49 degrees (centigrade).
Having no sort of shade in our equipment we decided to setup lunch right beside the road roller. The workers started napping one after the other so I decided I would take a short nap too.
It was my own screams that woke me up. I hadn't screamed like that since I scraped my knee when I fell down my bike when I was 8. Life has a weird way of teaching you physics you see, I was sleeping with my feet pointed to the roller. Somehow the roller had started off over the wrong side of the road and then it began. It was gentle at first, like a soft hand pressing my feet to relieve me off my stress. And then as the pressure increased and my toes shattered I shouted. My first instinct was to pull myself away but I realised that I was in so much shock that I could hardly open my eyes let alone move my body. Shock generally leads to temporary paralysis. And there I was thinking that at some point I would wake up or someone would stop the roller. Anything other than being there with that pain would have been a bliss. When I woke up to the noise of my own scream I had too little time to fathom what was happening to me. I could hear my bones crunching beneath the sheer weight of the roller and now the blood was getting pushed up my legs up to my genitals and towards my intestines.
That's when I heard my femurs splitting and I opened my mouth to scream but I couldn't find any voice. Just a croaking sound escaped my nose. I passed out a about 12 painful seconds after that. I'd say the longest 12 seconds of my life. When I woke up it was a week later in the hospital bed sans my legs. They told me they tried everything but there was no bones left to mend. They saved my genitals but I have to pee in a bag for the rest of my life. That's the worst part you see, if it had just been the 12 seconds of morbid pain and then it was the end then I would have been happy that it ended. But it didn't. It had only begun. Post surgery they (doctors) tell you that there will be some pain. They're kidding you. There is so much pain that death seems an easy escape. Either that or get hooked on pain meds. I did the latter. The meds worked in a weird way you see. The pain was still right there but it seemed as if it were far off. Unattached to my body. It was as if the broken pieces of my feet were hurting and I was somehow still feeling them. Recovery was long, tiring and depressing but it was still there. And now here I am teaching other "feetless" people Shakespeare's thoughts about love and family.
The interview ended and I left the place a little more thankful to be able to feel the things that some people cannot. I wished him luck and he laughed at this but then wished me the same.
