The SUV was getting close. I could hear it, smell it. The crunching, scraping, ripping sounds echoing through the garage got louder. I went for speed, pushing the lever all the way forward, turning into the last straightaway with every bit of speed Chair could generate.

The scene in front of me was not promising: The ramp split into entrance and exit lanes separated by the ticket kiosk. Black-and-white-striped gates blocked both lanes. The gates were about four feet high, I estimated, not nearly high enough for the back of Chair to slip under. I leaned way to my left, hoping there was sufficient room between the end of the gate and the wall for me to squeeze past.

Just as I did, a dark blue SUV entering the garage stopped at the ticket kiosk and a woman reached out to take a ticket.

I leaned all the way to my right. Several years earlier, when I was learning how to navigate the world in a wheelchair, I had to fill out an insurance form. It required all the basic information. Two questions stumped me: height and weight. Months earlier, that had been an easy question, six-two, 215 pounds. But on this form I responded five-five, 550 pounds. It was at that moment I accepted how completely my world had changed.

Five-five goes into four feet only with great damage. I had one chance, I figured. I pulled up on the seatback control and Chair’s back started dropping. I grasped both arms and pushed back on it as hard as I could, willing it to move faster. It was going to be tight; if I hit the gate with my body or my head, I was a dead man rolling. Even if the gate just clipped the top of the chair, it would flip backward and I was still a dead man.

Every inch, every tenth of an inch, would make the difference between life and death. The SUV swung around the final turn. In that instant the driver must have realized he had run out of ramp. He slammed down hard on his brakes, which caused the rear end to spin slowly around until the front and rear wheels were parallel and the side of the SUV had become a metal wall sliding toward the kiosks—and still gaining on me.

Bad for me. I faced even worse problems than he did. My brakes might be able to stop Chair—but not me. The science about that was pretty simple: A body in really fast motion tends to fly through the air in really fast motion when the Chair in which he is riding stops suddenly.

The woman in the SUV got her ticket and straightened up in her seat, then looked straight at me as the gate went up to let her enter. While it sounds like something you’d read in a book, our eyes met. She saw me sliding directly toward her and, I’m guessing, she also saw the black wall of sheet metal a few feet behind me. Rather than thinking, she reacted. How she did it, I swear to God I will never understand, but somehow she slammed that SUV into reverse and gunned it. The SUV rocketed back, slamming into the side of a cement mixer stopped in a long line at a traffic signal.