It probably isn’t the best idea in the world to make a habit out of falling asleep on the couch, but let’s not pretend we haven’t all been there before. Just one more episode of that new hockey show, and oops, you’re out. Typically, you just wake up with a stiff neck, but when Rutland, New York’s Skip Cunningham fell asleep watching his stories Tuesday night, he woke up with a lot more than an achy back. He had, in fact, been hit by a car in his own living room, WWNY reports.
“Yeah, this is where the couch was…I was laying down watching television,” the 70-year-old New Yorker told the news channel. “Next thing I knew, I woke up and blood running down my head and a car laying on top of me.”
Turns out, at roughly midnight, a driver blew through an intersection and crashed into Cunningham’s house so hard, the driver ended up running a man over in his own home. You know, as one occasionally does. After all, this is America, baby. Of course, it would have been fitting if the man who crashed into Cunningham’s living room had been driving a truck, but instead, it appears to have been a good ole Toyota Camry. Oh well. Maybe when he gets his insurance check, he’ll end up replacing it with a trusty new Chevy Ram-350.
Time to buy a lottery ticket
As you probably guessed, based on his ability to speak with a news channel, Cunningham thankfully survived, although he did need treatment at a nearby hospital. “You know, and the guy’s running around saying ‘sorry, sorry, sorry’. I says, ‘Well, call 911,'” Cunningham told WWNY. Once he made it to the hospital, he reportedly received 13 stitches in his head. When the news channel spoke with his daughter, Heather LaRose, she said he’s doing okay but pointed out that things could have easily ended very differently if he’d been babysitting his granddaughter at the time of the crash.
“Glad that, I mean, it didn’t happen during the day when she was out playing. I mean, you see all the toys and stuff in there and – it just could have been – it was bad enough, it could have been so much worse,” LaRose told WWNY.
Despite his close brush with death, it also sounds like Cunningham didn’t let being run over in his own home get in the way of a few good jokes. “I tried to get them to stop at Stewart’s so I could go in and buy a lottery ticket,” he told the news channel. “But they wouldn’t stop. Said, ‘nope.'” Which, you know, from a medical perspective, was probably the right call. When you’ve got an elderly patient with a head injury in your ambulance, it’s usually best to get them to the hospital as soon as possible. But on the other hand, let the man play, ref!
Apparently, this wasn’t the first time someone blew through that intersection, either. In fact, since Cunningham has lived there, it’s reportedly the fifth time someone’s ended up in his driveway or hit his house after missing the stop sign. Hopefully whoever has the authority to do something will decide that maybe the fifth time is enough, and put up a flashing light or a guardrail.
