Hurt driver's rescuer: 'I saw him there sleeping'
That person, whoever it was, saved his life. And I just want to find them and say `Thank you. Thank you for giving me my husband back.'
- Debora Rodeffer-Theisen
This is the closest thing to hell I can imagine. He was minutes from home, and yet Ed Theisen might just as well have been on another planet. Even his wife drove by his prone form twice in 36 hours. If not for a cabinet maker riding in the back of a pickup truck having the foresight to call police, Theisen might have become just another statistic.
Theisen, a chemical engineer from Friendswood, began March 22 like most other days. He said goodbye to his 16-year-old stepson at about 6 a.m. before he set out for work in the Galleria area.
He was driving up the Gulf Freeway just outside of downtown when traffic slowed and he was rear-ended. Theisen pulled his white Ford Taurus to the shoulder, as did the other driver, and got out to exchange insurance information.
Rather than walk into the heavy oncoming traffic, Theisen stepped between the concrete barriers near the HOV lane. Suddenly, he felt weak.
"He thought he was having a heart attack or a stroke," Rodeffer-Theisen said. "He grabbed the concrete barrier and just went down."
Theisen was instantly paralyzed, unable to move anything except his right hand 4 or 5 inches.
The other driver did not see where Theisen went and told police, who made an accident report, that he had just walked off, his wife said. The tow truck driver who hauled off Theisen's car about 7 a.m., and who likely was his last hope, did not see him, Rodeffer-Theisen said....
As the hours wore on with no explanation, friends began to call area morgues.
Rodeffer-Theisen, friends and family were plastering their Friendswood neighborhood with missing-person fliers with Theisen's photograph, when the Houston Fire Department called to say that he was alive. Rodeffer-Theisen immediately called Memorial Hermann Hospital.
Theisen, his wife and children in a recent family photo.
"They said, `We have him here and he is alive and he is saying he loves you,' " Rodeffer-Theisen said. "He was covered in Houston pollution -- it was coming out of every pore -- but he was alive."Doctors determined that Theisen had broken his neck and suffered a spinal cord injury. He underwent surgery on his neck Monday. He will remain in traction for some time and will have to undergo physical therapy to regain movement.
Ed Theisen is one lucky cowboy. Houston traffic is bad enough for those drivers who do their daily penance to the freeway gods. Imagine spending 36 hours camouflaged in plain sight, and yet at the same time being passed by perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in shiny metal boxes. Fortunately for Theisen and his family, the one person who saw him cared enough to follow up.
