Comedian Laura Clery recently recounted a frightening experience that she says almost cost her her life.
On Friday, May 22, Clery shared via Instagram that it was the “most terrifying night of my life as a single mom.” She explained that while home alone preparing for bed, her 600-pound refrigerator toppled over, pinning her against the counter. “I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe right. Was impossible to get off and I could feel myself losing consciousness. My kids were in the house,” she wrote.
She continued, “I genuinely didn’t know if I was getting out of that alive. Thank God my phone was in my pocket and I was able to call 911. Thank god it didn’t fall on my kids. It took three firefighters to lift it off me. I’m still shaking.”
Clery also posted a video showing her being taken to an ambulance, where she inquired whether she had broken anything. The paramedics informed her that she was being transported to a trauma center.
“As a single mom, my biggest fear came true. I was very seriously hurt and stuck while home alone with my two young kids. Thank GOD I was able to call 911,” she reiterated in the video. “Thank. God.”
Clery further detailed the event in a Patreon post, revealing that her son had climbed onto the fridge. (Clery has two children with ex-husband Stephen Hilton.)
“I saw it shift slightly, just enough to make my stomach drop,” she recounted. “So I ran over to push it back into place. I thought I’d just nudge it in and move on with my day like a woman who has control over her life. The second I pushed it, it came down on me. Not slowly. Not in a way where I could catch it or jump out of the way. It just fell.”
She described having trouble breathing, writing, “I could feel it getting harder to inhale, like my body was just slowly deciding to shut down. And I’m just there, pinned under a fridge, thinking this is the dumbest way anyone has ever died.”
After calling 911, Clery said it took three firefighters to free her from the fridge. In a Facebook post on Friday, she expressed being “so deeply grateful that we’re all OK and also not OK…”
“I keep getting these flashbacks that just hit out of nowhere,” she wrote. “Like I’m right back under that fridge, stuck, unable to move, my kids in the house. My brain keeps looping all the ‘what ifs’ on repeat. What if I had gone unconscious. What if it had been my son under there. What if he had run out of the house while I was trapped.”
She added, “The second they got the fridge off me, I was just screaming for him. He was in the backyard, watching through the glass, scared. But my mind keeps going to all the ways that could have gone differently. It’s such a weird place to be… feeling overwhelmingly grateful and completely shaken at the same time. My body is wrecked, my lower back is f***ed, but nothing is broken, which feels like a miracle.”
Clery asked her followers if they had tried EMDR therapy for similar experiences, saying she is “just… processing.” In another Facebook post, Clery expressed her frustration with the contractors who installed the fridge, saying she wanted to “f***ing sue” them.
“This is a nearly 600 pound stainless steel French door fridge that was NOT properly mounted into the wall,” she stated. “Because of that, my 7 year old was able to pull it forward, and when I tried to push it back, it fell on me and was fully crushing me. It nearly killed me. And it could have absolutely killed my child. This should never have been possible. This was negligence.”
