A hit-and-run driver left me for dead. I’ll never be the same.

I have a white helmet sitting on a shelf in my home office. It’s hideous, and I hate it with the heat of a trillion suns.

The helmet is emblazoned with the sticker noting that it was issued to patient “Hickey Brian, 35M” in 2008. It is a constant reminder of the worst months of my life — a time of dependence, victimization, and weakness.

In the first picture I have wearing it, my body is secured to a stretcher. I wore a neck brace. Tubes fed me with oxygen after surgeons cut a hole in my throat.

The picture was taken around Dec. 21, 2008, the day my battered body was moved to Magee Rehabilitation Hospital in Center City from Cooper University Hospital in Camden, where I was rushed by ambulance after a hit-and-run driver left me for dead in the middle of a cold, dark, South Jersey street on Black Friday.

I still don’t know who hit me. I probably never will.

I still don’t know who hit me. I probably never will.

I had a long recovery, and I’ve spent the years tracking hit-and-runs in our region and beyond. The statistics are tragic — 31 people were killed by fleeing drivers in Philadelphia last year, three times the number as in 2019. This year doesn’t look as if it will be much better; last Sunday, two people were killed in hit-and-run crashes within hours of each other.

Many stories about hit-and-runs rightly focus on people who lose their lives. I’m writing this piece to offer a little insight about people like me, who survive these crimes and face months or years of painful rehabilitation and, in many cases, emotional trauma. No two recoveries are the same, but after surviving a brutal hit-and-run, nobody is the same person they were before.

» READ MORE: Families grieve as hit-and-run deaths reach a record in Philadelphia

I don’t remember getting hit around 10 p.m. I was walking to the train back to Center City after having drinks with friends at Tom Fischer’s Tavern. The shriek of car brakes and a loud thud prompted a dog to start barking out a nearby window. When its owner came outside, he saw my body lying in the street and called 911.

If surgeons hadn’t removed two large pieces (or flaps) of my skull, my swelling brain would have popped like a fatty piece of bubblegum. After the surgery, I wore that god-awful helmet to protect my exposed brain. The helmet was the bane of my existence, despite the fact that it protected me from certain death.

After emerging from several weeks in a medically induced coma, I spent the next month undergoing physical, occupational, and speech therapy at Magee. I don’t remember a lot of it. That’s par for the course, according to Todd M. Lewis, the clinical neuropsychologist and brain injury clinical specialist who led my Magee care team, and with whom I recently spoke to help fill in the blanks.

“I always tell people that ‘I meet you before you meet me,’” Lewis said. “When patients like yourself get here, they don’t have any idea what’s going on. You were angry, uncomfortable, and confused.”

He was right. I mean, who in their right mind angrily refuses to leave their hospital bed when told that Phillies manager Charlie Manuel is down in the lobby with the World Series trophy his team recently won? (That really happened. Manuel brought the trophy to the hospital to cheer up patients. And I refused to participate.)

Temporary paralysis left me unable to even scribble with my right hand, a devastating prospect for a writer. Unable to walk, I was in a wheelchair. Aphasia left me fighting to both understand others and express myself. My therapists had to teach me how to put on my own shirt.

Once the paralysis faded and I could stand on my own, physical therapy focused on walking. I’ll long remember those loops on the floor trying to reach 100 feet, even if I was only able to walk four or five feet at a time.

I was released from Magee — 6abc cameras on site — in a shade under a month.

At home, I gingerly walked up and down my block in East Falls, sometimes jarred by the sounds of passing cars. I kept a journal, which helped me relearn to write. In April, I had my final surgery (to reattach my skull flaps) and, within a year of being hit, I returned to work full time. Our son Louden was born in June 2010, which allowed my wife and I to put a nearly tragic time in our lives behind us. The years since have taught me that raising a child, with a wife who never left my side, is much more life-defining than getting hit by a car.

Still, I have had many moments of rage. Realizing that a total stranger left me for dead makes me question humanity. It leaves me hoping karma exacts revenge. (There’s still a reward for anyone who turns the scumbag in.)

My hit-and-run awareness mission has also kept me in touch with fellow victims.

Doug Markgraf was stuck by a hit-and-run driver in West Philadelphia a couple of years before me. An avid bicyclist, he worried that he’d never be able to pedal again. “There was a lot of anger for the ability that I didn’t have,” he told me a couple of weeks ago. But after years of hard work, Markgraf reclaimed his life in 2011 by riding a bike more than 3,000 miles from San Francisco to Toms River, N.J., to boost awareness of brain injuries.

In 2010, Tony Foltz was walking across the Ben Franklin Parkway when, in a crosswalk, he was left for dead by a hit-and-run driver who was ultimately caught and convicted. One side of his body still feels a little weaker than the other, and he still takes medication for seizures tied to the brain injury, but he did the Broad Street Run in 2011 and is able to work as an assistant public defender in Delaware County. “I’ve done a lot of what I wanted to do in life, but it just annoys me that I had to do it five, 10 years later than planned,” he told me recently.

In a perfect world, drivers wouldn’t flee after they run down another human being. But this is far from a perfect world.

Some states have boosted sentences for these violent crimes. In 2014, Kevin’s Law in Pennsylvania upped minimum fatal-crash sentences to three years in prison. That is a good start. But until those penalties are on par with those for homicide or manslaughter, it’s not enough of a deterrent.

Countless investigators have told me they want nothing more than to solve these cases but just don’t have enough evidence to do so. Because of that, every conviction I hear about brings me some peace. At least all drivers don’t get away with it.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to shake the guilt I feel when hearing about others who haven’t recovered — be that physically or neurologically — as well as I have. Lewis urged me to lose that thought. Patients don’t say things like “How come he got better?” he told me. “It’s inspirational to them that you did.”

I hope he’s right. And I hope that one day, when I look at that hideous helmet on the shelf, that is what I’ll think about, instead of the pain that brought it into my life in the first place.

Brian Hickey is a local writer, soccer dad, and Quizzo host.