Renee Baruch literally didn’t know what hit her.
In May 2023, the retired lawyer was crossing the street in uptown Manhattan when, the next thing she knew, she was waking up in an ambulance with what she described as “the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life.”
In the ER, she recalled, the doctors gave her morphine—but it barely took the edge off. Strangely, it was her palms that hurt the most. “There was a plastic surgeon sewing up my face, and he kept telling me to stop screaming,” Baruch said. “I wasn’t screaming because of him sewing up my face. I was screaming because of the pain in my hands.”
Later, Baruch learned that she’d been hit by an e-bike. The rider, she said, attempted to flee before bystanders stopped him. The agony in her hands was the result of nerve damage in her neck, for which she would need surgery. The doctors told her that every day she went without it, she risked total paralysis, but Baruch didn’t want to have surgery right away. Her partner was in Maryland, dying of pancreatic cancer, and she wanted to be able to drive back and forth to see him in his final days. So she scheduled the surgery for January 2024. “I thought by then he’d be dead,” she explained.
But he wasn’t, because one of the chemo treatments worked better than anyone expected. Baruch had to go ahead with the surgery, and her partner died as she was recovering. “So I missed it,” she told me.
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