for me to give him a kiss, so I leaned down and gave him one, and then he shut his eyes. I thought he’d died. I really thought that was it.”
Rob was still alive, but badly injured. The paramedics rushed him to the Regional Medical Center in Memphis. His injuries were extensive, including four skull fractures, a broken hand, and a broken leg. But it was his behavior that had Dr. Preston Miller most concerned.
“It’s pretty typical for folks who have a significant head injury to be combative or confused or a little bit out of it,” Dr. Miller explains, “so he went from our shock trauma room to the CAT-scan room, where he had a CAT scan of his brain.”
The CAT scan revealed that Rob had received a traumatic head injury. A small blood clot had formed in his brain.
“Those sometimes stay the same and sometimes get worse,” says Dr. Miller. “There’s no way of knowing. If they stay the same, it’s great, but if they enlarge, it either leads to serious brain damage or death.”
Cale was there when they did another CAT scan early the next day. “By about 7:00 in the morning, the blood clot had tripled in size. So the doctors rushed in and started telling us that they needed to do emergency surgery.”
Rob was rushed to an operating room where neurosurgeons spent the next several hours opening his skull and removing the blood clot from his brain. When they finished, there was nothing left to do but wait and pray that Rob would regain consciousness.
Meanwhile, Cale struggled to deal with the grim possibilities. “The doctors came out and said he could be a vegetable. I thought about what I would do if he did die. I cried more than anybody knew. Not only was I going to lose the person I was with, but Rob’s also my best friend. I never gave up hope on him, though. We prayed, and we prayed, and we prayed.”
Miraculously, two and a half hours after the surgery, Cale’s prayers were answered.
Rob remembers, “I wake up, and I’m in a room by myself. I’ve got hoses and IVs hanging off me, and I don’t have a clue as to where I’m at. I don’t remember having a wreck. Then the nurse walks in and tells me to be still, and all I can say is ‘What am I doing here?’”
“He got better like overnight,” Cale marvels. “I mean, he had brain surgery on Monday and was at home in bed by Friday. It was totally miraculous that he recovered the way he did.”
But as astounding as his physical recovery was, it was nothing compared to the life-altering change that had taken place in Rob’s attitude.
“I had a whole new perception, a whole new feeling inside. I felt clean. This wreck was the best bad thing that ever happened to me because it was a reality check. It sobered me up, straightened me up.”
But there was still one nagging question in his mind.
“When you hear about a child that dies in a car wreck or about anyone that passes away, you wonder why a person like me was saved. You wonder, Why am I here? Was it just an accident that I lived?”
Rob underwent a remarkable transformation. With a newfound sense of purpose, Rob channeled his energy from motorcycles and parties to starting his own business as an electrical contractor.
Rob said, “I believe that prior to the wreck I would not have been able to handle the business. I would like to say I’m on my way back up and I thank God every day.”
But Rob still wondered why he of all people would be given a second chance at life, and then, almost a year to the day after his accident, Rob was driving past the same intersection when he received the answer to his question.
“I was heading back to the office in a dead run—you know, in a hurry. I come up, and there’s a car wreck right in front of me,” recalls Rob. “I mean, two trucks hit each other right in front of me. I was the first one on the scene.”
Rob ran to the nearest vehicle while calling 911 on his cell phone. Meanwhile, inside the other vehicle, Vicky O’Briant was just beginning to regain consciousness.
Vicky remembers, “I didn’t know anything about how we had flipped over or anything. I just knew that I was upside down, and I really couldn’t get a grasp on where I actually was.”
When Rob was certain the first driver was okay, he turned his attention to Vicky’s truck.
“With truck damage as bad as that, you don’t know what you’re fixing to find. You’re praying that a cop might show up, because I don’t want to do it. I managed to get the driver of the vehicle to the curb. I sat her down on the grass, and the little boy sat down right beside her.”
“That’s when I started screaming about my daughter, Camille,” says Vicky, “that my daughter was hurt very badly.”
Rob rushed back to the vehicle. “I look in, and there is a little girl, upside down, unconscious, and just hanging limp with the seat belt around her neck. Her lips and skin were exactly the same color—she was one solid color blue.”
Worse still, the truck was leaking fluid and the engine was still running. Rob knew that if he didn’t act quickly, the truck would catch fire or explode.
“There was no room inside the truck. It was crushed and I couldn’t get the seat belt unbuckled. At this point, I’m now praying, ‘Please don’t let this truck blow up.’ I’m throwing a double prayer up to God—‘Please don’t let this baby die, whatever you do, please don’t let this baby die. And please don’t let the truck blow up.’ Luckily, I had a small Leatherman pocketknife on me and I was able to use that to cut the seat belt.”
Rob quickly cut the young girl free. But she remained unconscious.
“I had this little child lying in front of me. And I really didn’t want to move her because I thought she might have some internal injuries. So I decided I would stay inside the truck with her and pray that an ambulance or somebody would show up.”
Vicky was beside herself. “I didn’t know anything about what was going on—if my daughter was okay. And I was so scared that I was just screaming. I didn’t know how to help her. I just knew that somebody was in there helping my daughter.”
After ten terrifying minutes, paramedics finally arrived. Luckily, the truck never caught on fire, and the paramedics were able to get Camille out. With the situation finally under control, Rob left the scene without a word. Vicky and her children were taken to a local hospital. Miraculously, no one had suffered any serious injuries, including her daughter, Camille.
“The doctors told me that if someone hadn’t cut her out of that seat belt, she would have suffocated,” says Vicky. “There was no way that she probably would have made it.”
But Vicky had no way of thanking the heroic stranger that had saved their lives that day … until she stumbled upon a clue to his identity.
“A few days later we decided we were going to clean the truck and get our personal possessions out. We looked in the backseat and there was a Leatherman knife that we’d never seen before, and I said, ‘This must be the knife that cut my daughter out of her seat belt.’ So I turned it over and there was a man’s name on it. When I got home, I looked in the phone book and the man’s name was right there. It was the only Rob Gingery that there was.”
Rob was working at home when the telephone rang. Little did he know, it was
