Hit and Run: How Shame and the Unhealthy Default Reality Collide
My dog lost a leg, and for a moment, I lost some faith in humanity.
Note: This semi-disturbing essay is followed by a few cheery Healthy Deviant Digest Tidbits. Don’t miss ‘em!
Trigger warning: This essay discusses an accident in which my dog was badly injured. I describe her injury in some detail. There is one photo of her in triage with a little blood visible.
IT STARTED OUT like any other morning walk. We bopped around at the creekside nature area near my house, Sally Sue sniffing everything and pouncing at random rodents in the long grass. Me looking up at the sky and down into the water, feeling mesmerized by so much beauty.
On the way home, we paused frequently along our curving country road for passing traffic. Sally Sue is a known wheel chaser: She goes bonkers not just for cars, but everything with wheels — bicycles, strollers, wheelchairs, skateboards, even shopping carts.
So for months now, we’ve been practicing calm, doing preemptive sit-and-waits as various wheeled things passed by.
When the white truck pulling a trailer turned onto our road, we had just crossed over to the narrow-shouldered side where my driveway climbs a hill. There wasn’t much room between us and the hill face, so I gathered up Sally Sue’s long leash in one hand and had her sit and wait next to me by the roadside, which she did nicely.
Until she didn’t.
The truck passed by us without incident, but the rattling trailer must have triggered Sally Sue’s “GO!” reflex. She lurched out with full pit-bull strength. It was then I felt the loop of leash wrapped around my ankle.
When she jerked, it pulled my leg out from underneath me. I fell, hard, onto the road. When my body hit the ground (or maybe on the way down?), my hand flew open, and Sally Sue took full advantage of the new length, running straight at the trailer’s turning wheels.
Suddenly, everything went to slow-motion.
I saw Sally Sue’s left leg and head going under the wheels. I screamed. She howled in pain, somehow managed to pull herself free. The driver swerved abruptly, then slowed.
I saw my dog hopping back to me, one bloody leg lifted, an oozing red wound on her head where her fur and skin had been grated away to raw flesh.
After quickly examining her wounds, I looked up for help and saw the truck and trailer rolling away from us — not speeding, just kind of easing forward, like you might in an automated carwash.
About 50 feet away, the driver came to an almost-stop. I saw him look in the rear view mirror. I assumed he would pull over then, back up, turn around. But he did not. Instead, he gradually accelerated.
I gestured for him to come back, suddenly aware that I was stranded — too far from home to carry my badly injured 60 lb. dog home, much less load her into the car by myself.
Could he not see me? I rose to my knees, one arm cradling Sally Sue, the other waving wildly for help. I yelled as loud as I could: “Hey, you hit my dog! Come back!”
Then I yelled again, adding a bunch of swear words. It made no difference.
I couldn’t see the truck’s license plate, but I could see the logo on the trailer.
It was for — get this — a dog-training company.
I committed the company name and logo to memory as I panic-dialed my sister to come as fast as she could.
An hour later, I was at the animal emergency clinic hearing my dog’s prognosis. No internal injuries, they thought, but the large wound on her leg was a problem. It could not be closed and would be prone to infection, potentially compromising the bone below. Her paw was also moving too loosely, suggesting ligament damage.
This left us with two awful options:
A series of daily, painful, in-office debriding and bandage-changing procedures (requiring general anesthesia each visit) for between 7 and 10 days, followed by one or more surgeries a month or so after the initial wound had healed, with no guarantees this would result in a properly working limb.
Amputation. Which would cost my dog her leg, but have her home, recovering, and mobile the day after surgery.
After some agonizing consideration, I concluded that Sally Sue would be better off — faster wound healing, less medical trauma, and perhaps better longterm mobility — without the damaged limb.
My heart ached for Sally’s loss. It ached for this messed-up world of ours, where people crash into living beings and then drive off, leaving a trail of wounded body-minds in their wake.
Once Sally Sue was sedated and awaiting surgery, I climbed into my car and had a miserable sob. Then I looked up the kennel company address.
It wasn’t far from my home. I decided to drive there directly, without calling first.
This, in retrospect, was probably not a wise thing to do. I gave zero thought to my own safety. I did not even have a solid plan of what I wanted from this encounter.
I just wanted to know who had hit my dog — and kept on driving.
To be clear, I know that it was not necessarily this guy’s fault that he hit my dog.
Certainly, seeing us on the narrow shoulder, he could have slowed his pace, watched more carefully. But it was Sally Sue who lurched out at his tires. It was me who failed to notice the loop around my leg, and who dropped that handful of leash when I fell.
What got me, though, was how he just … drove away. From her, clearly injured, and from me, lying in the ditch, yelling and waving at him to come back.
What would make a person — especially a dog person — do that?
When I turned onto the kennel company’s dead-end road, I saw the truck and trailer behind some outbuildings. I parked, and even before I got out of the car, I saw a woman walking out of the house.
She did not look happy to see me. I got the sense she knew why I was there.
Still wearing my blood-spattered shirt, I introduced myself and told her about that morning’s accident. When I used the term hit-and-run, she reacted with something between skepticism and sarcasm.
“HIT and RUN?!” she blurted.
“Yes,” I said. “By a person driving the truck and trailer parked right over there. Did anybody from your company report it?”
She didn’t answer, just frowned and turned toward house, muttering as she strode away: “Well, he didn’t tell ME he had HIT anything.”
I heard voices inside, and then out he came — the guy who had hit my dog and left us both a mess by the roadside.
He did not make eye contact as he approached. He mostly looked at the ground.
He seemed friendly, though — and oddly cheery, presenting as largely naive about our tragic morning encounter.
“Well, hi there! So what are you saying happened?”
I described the accident in simple terms. With his wife standing next to him, he appeared simultaneously conciliatory and reluctant to take any responsibility.
“Oh my gosh, well that’s just terrible. I’m so sorry to hear that. What an awful thing.”
It was unnerving. His manner broadcast denial even as he claimed to be “just heartbroken” about my dog’s condition and impending amputation.
“What a shame. I had no idea,” he said. And then he added: “I feel like I should give you a hug.”
Weird, right?
You know the “fight-or-flight” (sympathetic nervous system) response to acute stress? You know how there are other options, like “freeze” and “fawn?”
This looked like fawning to me. And it smelled of shame.
In a flash second, this guy’s life story came to me. I guess it is really more my story of his life, because I cannot know that it is true. But here’s what I intuited (guessed) in that moment:
This man was once a child who had learned from painful experience that mistakes would be punished with violence. Physical, psychological — maybe both.
Perhaps his family life was bad enough that he’d had difficulty relating with people, so as a young man, he’d found solace in dogs.
Training dogs through reward and discipline — bonding with them and getting them to follow rules — I could see how that might be reassuring.
I could see why hitting and driving over a dog, particularly in plain view of her owner, might have triggered shame, panic, and cognitive dissonance in this person’s psyche.
I could see how those feelings might cause a person to gap and react from instinct, not logic or ethics, leading them to flee — momentarily oblivious to, say, the company logo emblazoned on their trailer.
I could imagine how being in such a dysregulated state might cause a person to obscure or even repress the truth — telling their partner (and perhaps themselves) only part of what had happened, and relying on a habitual strategy of hiding bad news in order to avoid punishment.
I could also imagine how such a person might have been drawn to partner with similar issues. Perhaps somebody used to feeling disappointed and angry about being repeatedly lied to or hurt — particularly by the people they most needed and wanted to trust.
Adult children of alcoholics, abusers, or otherwise not-great parents?
I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t any of my business. My pop-psychologizing could be all wrong. But reading up on this guy’s bio later, I did not feel too far off the mark. Lotta drama, lotta blank spots.
Later, reading this passage in a legal article on the psychology of hit-and-run drivers, my instinct was further confirmed.
The foundation of an individual’s moral and ethical standards is often laid in early childhood, influenced significantly by family, culture, education, and social interactions.
When these foundational elements are skewed, lacking, or negative, they can lead to impaired moral judgment in later life.
In societies where there is a high emphasis on individualism and self-preservation (exemplified by the United States), the moral decision-making process can become heavily self-centered.
This perspective may substantially diminish the sense of responsibility towards others, especially in high-stress situations like a car accident.
Sigh. Back to the driveway.
After a few more awkward minutes, the couple seemed to glean that I wasn’t there to yell or make threats. I just wanted them to be aware of what happened, to acknowledge it.
I thanked them for their time (was I perhaps fawning a bit myself?) and said I’d send an email with an update on my dog’s condition when I knew it.
I told the guy I hoped he would be more careful and do things differently next time. If there was ever a next time. God forbid. And then there wasn’t anything more to say.
I had known from the beginning I was unlikely to get any real satisfaction from this exchange. But at least I now better understood what had happened.
I understood that on some level, our Unhealthy Default Reality — not just this one person, or Sally Sue, or me — was to blame.
I haven’t yet sent the guy an update on Sally Sue’s condition. I still don’t know the full extent of her injuries, or her longterm prognosis. At present, I just know she is still in pain, depressed, and not at all herself.
She is not the same dog who was happily pouncing and racing around that nature area just a couple weeks ago. And I’m not the same calm, carefree person who was enjoying my time with her in that beautiful space.
We are both suffering from post-traumatic stress — flinching at loud sounds and sudden movements, not sleeping great, defaulting toward self-protection.
That said, my faith in humanity, while shaken, is returning. Because friends and family and even the folks here and in my other online communities have expressed so much concern and care for us both.
And because I know that when people do bad things, there is generally a reason: Some bad shit has happened to them.
A lot of that bad comes from our unhealthy culture — what I call our Unhealthy Default Reality. It is a pain-based, alienating reality that leads us to fear ourselves and each other, and to rarely get our most basic needs fully met.
It’s a culture that regularly wounds, insults, and deprives us. It’s a culture that accustoms us to shame, blame, dread, and loathing rather than to love, compassion, meaning, and connection.
It’s a culture that dims us and causes us to shrink from our own truth rather than illuminating and growing our best gifts.
So here we are. In the Unhealthy Default Reality.
My dog has three legs. My heart still breaks a little every time I watch her hop and wobble or hear her whimper. But we are both healing.
I hope the guy who hit Sally Sue is healing, too. And maybe recognizing that he needs and deserves to get some some help with that.
To me, at the deepest level, that is what Healthy Deviance is about — a refusal to be brought down by the Unhealthy Default Reality even as you acknowledge the damage it has done to you.
Healthy Deviance is about learning and growing through the Unhealthy Default Reality’s often brutal gauntlets, and authoring an empowered story outside of them.
It’s a willingness to get knocked down and get back up wiser — rattled perhaps, but with your hope and moral compass intact.
If we learn to do that, maybe we can do something other than just fight, flee, freeze, and fawn all our lives.
Maybe we can rest, digest, grow, love, and empathize with each other (the realms of the parasympathetic nervous system).
Maybe can navigate the Unhealthy Default Reality not as victims or perpetrators, but as creative, compassionate agents of change. As Healthy Deviants.
Amen.
P.S. You can read an update on Sally Sue’s healing progress here.
THIS WEEK’S TIDBITS
Encouragements to notice, learn, and deviate from the Unhealthy Default Reality in whatever ways feel good to you.
Calling Out the Crazy
I recently got this email promotion from a makeup brand I generally like, and while I appreciate the “do you!” ethos of the larger campaign, the message — at least as it arrived in my inbox — spoke of the Unhealthy Default Reality to me.
I don’t need a “kit” to be me. And confidence most definitely does not come in a bag.
Got “Call Out the Crazy” examples of your own to share? Leave ‘em in the comments or send them to me at pilar@healthydeviant.com. I’ll happily share (with credit) my favorite submissions.
Revolutionary Act of the Week
(via my “101 Revolutionary Ways to Be Healthy”)
If you feel yourself losing traction in your healthy commitments, ask:
What's my highest choice right now?
What can I do to take one step in the right direction?
What would the healthiest, happiest version of me choose?
When was the last time I had a rest break, healthy meal, drink of water, screen-free time, or moment outside? 🤔
Take a moment to answer those questions — without overthinking or overcomplicating. Then, if you want to go deeper or need some inspiration …
READ: “The Way of The Healthy Deviant” (feature article first appeared in Experience Life magazine in Oct. 2018)
LISTEN: The “Healthy Deviance” episode of The Living Experiment podcast.
Healthy Deviant Happenings
I’m honored to be moderating (and participating in) a panel discussion at the Institute for Functional Medicine’s Annual International Conference — at the Bellagio in Las Vegas of all places — on June 1. The topic (working title): From Activation to Transformation: Understanding the Journey of the Engaged Patient. Fellow panelists include bestselling author and Whole30 cofounder Dallas Hartwig and leading functional nutritionist, author, and researcher Deanna Minich, PhD.
April marked the third anniversary of the audiobook version of The Healthy Deviant on Audible. Yep, I did the reading myself, and the reviews have been good! Find the audiobook (plus a free preview sample) here.
Oh man, there are SO many layers to this that I don't even know where to start. I'd say that man is very lucky it was you who owned the dog he hit. There are so many unstable humans out there, he could have encountered a lot worse than you.
My whole heart goes out to Sally Sue ❤️ 💓 💙 Tears welled up reading this because I know exactly how I would've felt if it were my dog. The absolute best thing is that dogs are sooo resilient and she will bounce back physically. Her anxiety might be a different story but she's got you. You two will have each other to lean on (now isn't the time for puns 😁)
So sorry this has happened to you and sweet Sally Sue! I can’t even imagine…
The man who hit your dog will be dealing with this shame and regret for many years to come. It really is a good reminder to not run away from your wrong doings as they will always haunt you unless you actually face them.