School trip ends in surgery

Supportive family, friends help Shanique Samuels recover

Sheldon Williams, Gleaner Writer

Today, Automotives starts a new series on persons who have survived serious motor-vehicle crashes in Jamaica. In the coming weeks, you will meet persons who have been hurt but are grateful to be alive. We hope that their stories will make others to realise that when a crash does not result in fatality it is still has long-lasting repercussions, and it will encourage more persons to use the road carefully.

What began as an ordinary school trip to Bodles Estate, St Catherine, ended in pain for Shanique Samuels when she was hit by a car while ordering lunch in a restaurant.

On Tuesday, February 7, 2006, she was among a group of Clarendon College schoolmates at a jerk centre in Old Harbour waiting to be served when a car ran over the sidewalk and into the shop, slammed into Shanique, breaking her right leg in three places.

Two days later, doctors had to amputate her right leg.

Describing the crash, Shanique said, "Friends were to the side of the counter and I went to the front. In the midst of ordering I heard a screeching sound, so I held up my head to see what it was. I only managed to glimpse a brown car climbing the sidewalk and heading towards me. Instinctively, I jumped up on the counter as if to escape, never thinking I would have been hit."

After the impact, Shanique felt a jolt of pain throughout her body and realised she was bleeding. "I felt a hot, warm pain piercing through my entire body and then I screamed as loudly as I could. My right leg was caught between the underside of the rugged concrete counter and the car. I felt it (the car) reverse and I fell to the ground," she recounted.

Persons immediately rushed to her assistance. "I was taken up by two ladies, who quickly put me into the back of a car and I was taken to the Spanish Town Hospital. At no point during the ordeal was I unconscious or unaware of the surroundings. I knew everything that had happened up to the point where I was transferred to the Kingston Public Hospital (KPH), after getting some amount of treatment at Spanish Town. All that went through my mind was that my leg was broken and I was going to the hospital, and that I was feeling pain," Shanique said.

"Initially, I just thought my leg was broken, but after a near 10-hour-long surgery at the KPH I was told my right leg was broken in three places and the veins, arteries and blood vessels were badly damaged," she said. That was a few minutes past 2 a.m. on Wednesday.

Then, Shanique said, "Thursday afternoon I was back in the theatre because the blood was not circulating in my leg despite the operation or the many pins that were in it. On Thursday afternoon - February 9, 2006 - the right leg was amputated above the knee."

Shanique said despite the loss of a limb, she has been spared any emotional or psychological ill-effects and is more focused on still being alive. "Injuries have not affected me one bit. I was never depressed or sad or lonely or sorry about the accident, or anything about it. I never once thought that if I didn't go on that school trip this never would have happened, or any such negative thought," she said.

"Instead, I spend my days being thankful and trying to enjoy the rest of my life. I owe a debt of gratitude to my friends, family and well-wishers who I think have been and still are, my greatest motivators. My family never abandoned me, my friends never scorned or deserted me, everyone stuck around and helped me to overcome that obstacle in my life," she said.

Shanique said while she hasn't deliberately revisited the site of the crash, she has passed by the area many times since then. "No particular thought went through my mind," she said. "I just know that's where the car hit me on that fateful day, and that's that. No feeling of remorse or pain or any such thing. I am not afraid of cars, nor am I scared to walk on sidewalks or to cross the street," she said.

Flashbacks are also irregular. "Yes, I have flashbacks every now and then - very rare. But I don't sit around and mope and cry to depress myself. It's nothing really to cry over; it's just like any other major event that happened in my life that I will not forget. I don't have time to sit around and relive the experience. I have long moved past that day," Shanique said.