A pregnant mother who pushed her kids out of the way and let herself get hit by a car instead is being honored at the Indy 500, waving the green flag to start the race.
Bailey Rogers was attending the Indy 500 last year on the Fourth of July, when she did something incredibly heroic. “Honestly don’t really know how it happened, what happened,” Rogers told WTHR. “I just saw a car coming at my kids, and I pushed them out of the way, and I got taken under the car.”
Rogers, who was pregnant, was left pinned underneath the car, and though her two children were saved, she worried that her preborn child had died. “I said, I’m pretty sure my baby’s dead,” she recalled. “The next thing I remember, I woke up here.”
“Here” was Indianapolis. Rogers was originally taken to IU Union Hospital in Terre Haute, where she was given an emergency c-section to save her baby’s life, before being Life-Flighted to IU Methodist Hospital. She was left grappling with some serious injuries, but incredibly, both she and her baby were alive.
“My femur was completely snapped in two,” she said. “I had a hip dislocation, my pelvis, my pelvic ring, my hip ball joint, it was all completely shattered.”
According to her doctors, it was Rogers’ pregnancy that saved her life. “They told me, basically, if I wasn’t pregnant, I wouldn’t have made it because your bones are so much more durable when you’re pregnant,” Rogers said. “I could’ve been not alive, but I’m here now, and I’m telling my story and telling people, ‘Don’t ever give up.'”
A year after the accident, Rogers is not only alive, but walking. “I had never seen her walk before,” Jennifer Mink, a registered nurse at IU Methodist, said. “To know what she’s been through and to see how well she’s doing now, it blows me away, but it doesn’t surprise me.”
And for Rogers, there is one special person to thank for it. “This is miss miracle baby, Miss Rayleigh,” she said. “She kept me alive, and I kept her alive, so she’s my miracle baby.”
