DDN – An Indiana man who was confined in his crashed truck for nearly a week has provided an update on his recovery one year later. Matt Reum, a native of Mishawaka, Indiana, said driving in the snow and at night is difficult for him, even a year after a life-changing crash.
“Even driving out here taking 80, 94, realizing that I’m 5 miles, six miles away from the wreck site, that does kind of put knots in my stomach,” Reum told me.
Reum escaped a rollover mishap on Interstate 94 in Northwest Indiana, but the accident locked him in his truck for six days over the Christmas holiday.
Reum’s truck had slid down an embankment, into Porter County’s Salt Creek, and landed beneath a bridge, out of sight of passing motorists.
“For the first two, three days I spent the majority of that time just trying to take apart everything on the inside of my truck trying to get myself out,” Reum told the media. “There were times in my truck where the only way I thought was going to get out of it was by taking myself out of it.”
Reum’s cell phone went out of reach during the crash, and his legs were immobilized.
Reum survived by drinking rainwater and, at his darkest times, considered amputating his legs to escape.
However, on the sixth day, Mario Garcia and his son-in-law, who were fishing in the creek, noticed Reum’s wrecked truck and phoned 911.
“I walked over there first, then he followed me, and we went up to it and I looked inside and moved the white airbag and there was a body in there, and I went to touch it and he turned around,” Garcia told me.
Crews were then able to remove Reum from the truck.
“The firefighters arrived, removed the rear door, and attempted to cut off the roof, which did not work. “They cut the driver’s side door off, removed the engine, and got me up and out,” Raum explained.
Reum spent three weeks in the hospital, and surgeons eventually amputated his left leg.
“He was almost dead when he was rescued. “They didn’t know if he was going to survive; it took a couple of days before they realized he was going to make it,” said Erika Celeste, a former NPR reporter and director of an organization for young journalists.
Celeste learned about Reum’s tale and encouraged him to speak with her kids. Following that meeting, the two collaborated to publish a book about his experiences.
“It’s a survival story, but Matt is also a very interesting person in general. “He was adopted from Russia when he was three years old and spent some time in a boy’s home,” Celeste explained.
The book “Still Standing” describes Reum’s life both before and after the disaster. With candid journal entries and images documenting his progress during recuperation.
Learning to walk again, running a 5k, public speaking, and the desire to establish his non-profit to assist homeless veterans in need of prosthetics.
The former welder and construction worker wants to use his experiences to help others.
“You do have that, you know, a revitalized sense of life and that revitalized sense, of, you know, second chance,” Raum told me. “The biggest thing I wanted people to take away from the book is to be able to walk away if they’ve been having a bad day with a renewed sense of hope and enlightenment that things do get better.”
Reum’s book signing event is scheduled for January 17th, one year after his release from the hospital.
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