He had just moved to town.  He was facing a serious medical crisis and his mind was elsewhere as he cruised through the stop sign & t-boned a car in the intersection.   After the fire department, police & paramedics showed up, he told them he hurt all over, and he was strapped to a board, loaded into the ambulance next to the other driver, & taken the few blocks to the hospital.

Once inside, they moved him to a bed in a room.  A folding room divider hid him from the other bed in the room, where he believed they had placed the other driver.  A nurse got some brief information from him, and then left, mentioning something about x-rays.

Just a few minutes later, bedlam broke out on the other side of the divider.  People were not yelling, but they were excited, talking fast & pointedly.  He heard code blue.  He heard start CPR.  He heard get an airway, and other technical terms being thrown about.  It slowly sunk in that the person on that other bed in the room had died, and the staff were very busy trying to bring her back. 

He started breathing fast.

                                               What was going on?

                         It was just a minor crash for christsakes!

                                       How can she die from that? 

                               What was going to happen to him? 

There was no one to ask - the entire Emergency Room staff was on the other side of that divider trying to save the life of the person he had just killed.

It seemed like ages before somebody noticed him.  They were still working hard next door, but the kind person saw that he was freaking out & moved him into another, private room.  She stayed with him for a short time and explained what was happening to the other patient, how he had come in with chest pain, and then his heart stopped, and how the staff was trying to - wait a minute!  You mean that's not the other person from the crash? 

The staff member gently explained that no, this was a completely different patient, and that the other driver was in a room & doing just fine. 

He immediately calmed down, then started complaining about being on the board.  A short time later, the resuscitation successful, his care continued, x-rays taken and he was removed from the board.

Then the cops showed up.  A ticket for failure to yield in his pocket, he was free to go.  He'll never think about running a stop sign the same way again.

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