“Whoa,” he thought. “If that column wasn’t there I could have been dead meat.”
By then he was past the car and he strained his neck to see the reflection of the Mercedes in his rearview mirror.
As a doctor, he knew he had the obligation to turn around at the other end of the tunnel and make his way back to the scene of the accident. It was late, it had been a long day, and he wanted nothing more than to get home and go to bed. He thought about the expression “crash” to describe the action of going to bed and wondered where that originated. He called for an ambulance on his car phone as he turned around and headed back into the tunnel
By the time he got to the scene of the crash, several cars and motorcycles were stopped and some photographers were taking pictures of the scene. He announced himself as a doctor, told the photographers to back off, and looked inside the vehicle.
“Who are these people?” he thought. “These guys must be pretty desperate to get pictures of the occupants of the car.”
He could tell there were four people in the car, and it was clear that none of them were wearing seatbelts. The driver, slumped over the steering wheel, had sustained serious head injuries and was most likely dead. He could hear groans coming from the woman in the back and the guy in the passenger seat. The head of the man next to the woman in the back seat was bent back at an awkward angle.
In spite of the blood covering her face from a gash in her forehead, he recognized the woman and understood the presence of the paparazzi.
“Oh, no,” he thought. “Do I deal with her first because of who she is or deal with the most critically injured? Triage is such an unexact science. Why wasn’t she wearing a seatbelt? Do these photographers have any respect? Where’s that ambulance?”
He decided to assist the woman first because her door was the only one that was not jammed. Still, her position partially under the driver’s seat made it difficult to reach her. He talked to her in English, but she only groaned in response. He solicited the help of one of the photographers to pull her out of the car with great care, and laid her on the road. A bystander offered his coat as a blanket. It was obvious that she was in great pain, and she was having difficulty breathing, probably due to broken ribs. Her head injuries were addressed with gauze, which he happened to have with him in his case in the car, and it stopped the bleeding, at least for now.
Finally the ambulance arrived and he told the EMTs who he was and barked orders to check the other passengers in the vehicle. The woman had lost a lot of blood, and one of the EMTs quickly put an IV in her. Finally she was put on a stretcher, loaded into the ambulance, and taken to the hospital.
Claude then turned his attention to the other passengers. The man in the passenger seat was pulled out gingerly through the window, and he, too, was put into a second ambulance and taken to a hospital. There was nothing that could be done for the other two.
By then the police had arrived and took statements from Claude, the photographers, and the other bystanders.
Claude was exhausted. It was close to 3:00 am by this time and he needed to go home. He collapsed on his bed once he got home but could not immediately fall asleep because his head was spinning with all the events of the night. He did eventually fall asleep and slept soundly until the phone rang around 9:00 am. Claude thought about not answering it, but picked up the phone before the call went to the answering machine. It was a reporter asking him how it felt to be the rescuer of Princess Diana.
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