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By Michaela Gordoni
Marvel actor Jeremy Renner is revealing the near-fatal mistake that caused his snowplow incident in 2023.
“‘Before exiting the driver’s cab! — Apply parking brake,’ the manual says. But I didn’t engage the parking brake, or disengage the steel tracks,” he explained in his new book, My Next Breath. “In that moment — an innocent, critical, life-changing moment — that tiny but monumental slip of the mind would change the course of my life for ever.”
As the tracks moved, he couldn’t keep his grip.
“I lurched violently forward, out of control,” he wrote. “In that split second I was catapulted off the spinning metal tracks, arms flailing. I arced over the front of the tracks, propelled forward, down on to the hard-packed ice, where my head hit the ground hard and instantly gashed open.”
Fox News Digital reported that the 14,000 lb machine then sluggishly rolled over Renner.
“It was a horrifying soundtrack,” he said.
Renner was near his home when the accident happened. A helicopter flew him to a local hospital, where he had surgery for blunt chest trauma and orthopaedic injuries. He spent the year recuperating from his injuries.
Renner waited 45 minutes to get help. The pain from 38 broken bones and other injuries was excruciating.
“Your body is lit up and you’re drowning, you’re on fire, and being struck by lightning all at once,” he said in a recent interview on CBS MORNINGS.
He previously told Jimmy Fallon that one of his eyes got dislocated from its socket, and he couldn’t see out of it.
“So you have weird things that go through your head like, ‘Well, I guess that’s real, but like I’ll worry about that later,’” he said.
“And I look at my legs. They were all twisted up, and I’ll worry about that later because I’ve got to worry about breathing first, right?”
One of his lungs was injured and he struggled to take air in.
“I had to exhale with all my might so I [could] suck air back in,” Jeremy Renner told Fallon. “Didn’t know I had a popped lung and all this other stuff going on. But I just had to breathe. If I didn’t breathe then I would have been gone, right?”
He added that the accident is a “great reminder of what we all should be looking at in life.”
“If we get too stressed or if things get too difficult or if it’s insurmountable odds or whatever it might be,” he said. “Just put one foot down and then put another foot down and then move towards it, right?”
Shortly after the accident, Renner shared a photo of himself at the hospital with a team of people and family beside him.
“I send out my love, respect and gratitude for the army of people that it took to put me back together again,” he wrote. “Thank you to each and every nurse, doctor, first responder…I literally owe you my life.”
Jeremy Renner’s story reminds us that we aren’t promised health or longevity. If we find hope and gratitude amid trauma and challenges, we can move forward, one step at a time.
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