My near death experience
Have you ever jolted awake from a deep sleep right at the moment you are tumbling headfirst down a steep set of stairs? Now think of the terror of this but instead of falling down a staircase, imagine a sharp, metal escalator in front of you waiting to cushion your fall. This is what happened to me, except it wasn’t a dream, it was reality and I really was thrown down a moving escalator, and it was all by the hands of my own mother.
It happened almost 18 years ago, but I still remember it as vividly as if it were yesterday. It happened mid-March, a dreary and cold time of year when the grey sky outside is always so bleak, but as a four year old, I was always so full of energy that the dullness of a rainy day would get me excited. As a child, I had a habbit of sliding down the stair banister every day, my mum would always scold me every single time about the dangers of this. I always found a shopping trip to be a boring excuse of a day out, but my mum had promised me we would go for a nice meal after and maybe even have ice cream for dessert, and having had an appreciation for good food even as a four year old, I remember that this was incentive enough to put up with the shops for a few hours.
When you’re only 3 ft 2” (give or take) everything seems gigantic, but this shopping centre was particularly massive, with enormous revolving doors that stretched from the floor well into the sky and infinite floors of shops upon shops. Thankfully my mum had thought to bring along my pram so I could have a little nap once I got too bored of walking around the endless shops, there was only so much my little legs could take.
It felt like weeks had passed by the time we got to the second shop; I’d given up on walking long ago. My complaining must have been somewhat annoying for my mum, but I never would have imagined it would almost become the cause of my demise.
Hours later we had eventually made it around the last few shops of the top floor of the shopping centre, finally the end was in sight. By this point I was desperate to go home, wriggling in my seat and begging my mum for ice cream. We headed over to the lift to transport us down to the ground floor, relief flooding my little body, but it was out of order, typical. That’s when my mum made a decision she would live to regret, as she pushed me towards the escalator. Planted at the top, four floors up from the bottom, peering down at the pea-sized people below us, we edged towards the metallic death trap.
Screams, pain, medics, and a lot of blood. One moment we were safely descending on the escalator, the next it was pure manic. Blood streaming from my face, my mum sobbing, her white top turned crimson, and people rushing all around us. My pram had fallen forward and I had gone flying headfirst down the escalator, colliding my nose and mouth into the razor-sharp edge of the metal steps. We rushed off to the hospital, the whole ordeal was all a bit of a blur to me, but I remember the piercing sound of the ambulance siren ringing out through the commotion.
An operation, a few stitches and several tears later I was completely fine and finally on my way to get the ice cream I rightly deserved. So there, something no one before knew about me: 18 years ago my mum almost killed me. But here I am, alive and well to tell the tale of traumatic experience that led to my haunting escalaphobia. However, a small part of me is left forever wondering whether the pram truly did fall forward or whether, after all of my tiresome complaining that day, it may have been given a little push towards the edge.
