Thanking her rescuers

Bettany Plummer will have to miss Halloween, but she’s been told she will be home from hospital in time for Christmas.

Plummer, an Abbotsford resident, was walking back to her home with groceries from the Freshco store in Aldergrove on Fraser Highway near Station Road around 9:45 a.m. on the morning of Friday, Oct. 3 when she was hit by a vehicle and dragged under its wheels.

“I had the pedestrian crosswalk,” Plummer told the Langley Advance Times.

“It was my turn to go, and there was a dark SUV turning to turn left, and she came around, and I made direct eye contact with her, and I said, ‘no, please stop,’ and I believe my bag got stuck around her mirror, and I got sucked under her tire, and she kept on driving.”

Plummer said she was dragged about 40 feet before the driver stopped.

She remembers people rushing to her aid, including an off-duty firefighter and wife, who was a nurse, who reassured her she was going to be okay.

“I don’t believe I would be here if it wasn’t for them getting out of the vehicles to help me. I think I would be dead right now,” Plummer recalled.

“And the encouragement from them just to keep breathing and stay calm and then quickly getting my husband on the phone for me. Very lucky that I don’t have any brain injuries.”

She’s now in Royal Columbian Hospital, where she faces a recovery time of “three to six weeks.”

“I have a broken collarbone, I have a broken left foot, multiple broken ribs, I have the ligaments torn off my left knee, I have road rash over 60 per cent of my body, I had a shattered pelvis that needed to be repaired, and then two days after that, three days after that, they did back surgery, from my tailbone to the middle of my back. I have four broken bones in my jaw, and I have 14 broken spots in my face in total.”

It will be her first Halloween away from her family.

“I’ve asked every day for updates [on my garden] because I accidentally grew a pumpkin patch this year and it did very well,” Plummer related.

“We got pumpkins for Halloween and I left them in the front yard and over the summer pumpkins grew and I got about 35 of them.”

On Oct. 12 she posted a thank-you message online to social media.

“From the bottom of my heart, I wanna say thank you to everybody in Aldergrove who stepped in to help,” Plummer wrote.

“Your quick actions have kept me here to be with my family and I am forever thankful for everyone of you. I’m sorry to anybody who had to witness it.”

Anyone with information, such as a dashcam video, that might assist the investigation, is asked to contact Langley RCMP at 604-532-3200.