Driving home, then ...

The last thing Arlington Heights native Karge Olsen remembers before waking up in a Minnesota hospital bed is dropping off a company car and heading to his mother-in-law's.

He normally heads home after work. Instead the trip to his mother-in-law's took him over the Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minnesota.

He didn't make it to his mother-in-law's, and his wife, Nichole, didn't know where he was. When she started getting calls asking if she had seen Karge, and is he OK, she knew for sure something was wrong, she told WABC-TV of New York.

"Initially I wanted to think ... I was confident he wasn't dead, but I knew he was in it and that he was hurt," Nichole said.

"I got in my car to come home, and apparently that's when it happened," Karge told the New York TV station.

"Next thing I remember is the hospital, basically. I don't really recall much before, during or after."

After the collapse about 6 p.m. Wednesday, emergency workers pulled Karge, 27, out of his vehicle, which had landed on top of a truck.

Olsen suffered a collarbone fracture, a slight spine fracture, a concussion and too many bumps and bruises to count, his wife said Friday from Karge's University of Minnesota Medical Center hospital room.

"He's doing better than a lot of other people who got hurt," she said. "The doctors said he might need some rehab, but it could've been worse."

The hospital room wasn't the first time Nichole learned Karge was alive, she told WABC-TV.

First, she got a voice mail left in the third of five calls she missed on her cell phone. In the voice mail, she could hear the car radio going, playing Karge's usual station, and she could hear him and his keys rattling around and then the car door opening up. He didn't speak.

Later, she saw him on TV.

"I just looked up at the sky and said, 'Lord, I just need to see him right now. Please,' " she said. "I went back out into the living room and sat down on the floor and turned the television back on, and literally two seconds later he popped up on the TV."

The footage showed Karge stumbling among the ruins, hand on his collarbone.

"It was just a glimpse, then it panned to someone else, and I was like, 'Thank you, thank you, thank you!' Nichole said. "And all of a sudden it panned back to him and he was actually standing up now and walking around. And I fell over bawling hysterically because I was just so relieved that I least I knew he was alive."

He says he doesn't remember it at all.

"Up until yesterday, I didn't even really know what was going on, to be honest with you," Karge told WABC-TV.

"She showed me a picture, and it was like, oh, wow, pretty big deal, I guess."

Olsen is one of nearly 100 people who have been treated at hospitals since the bridge disaster. He should be released this weekend, Nichole said.

Nichole told WABC-TV she cried as she greeted him in the hospital room, and Karge said, "Don't cry, don't cry." She had to explain to him what had happened.

"For the longest time I kept asking my family, too, what was I doing on that bridge?" Karge said. "I was trying to place in my head where that bridge was in relation to me going home. I actually was not on my normal way home. It was actually on my way to my mother-in-law's in Bloomington, so I wasn't even going back to my house.

"So all sorts of odd things got me onto that bridge that probably any other given day I wouldn't have been on it."

Olsen played varsity soccer for Prospect High School where he graduated in 1998. He went on to graduate from Winona State University in Minnesota, where he was an honor student.

For the most part, Olsen has remained in Minnesota since graduating, according to his childhood friend, Chris Pontarelli, who lives in Chicago.

Karge's parents, Nancy and Dean Hansen, recently moved to downstate Bloomington from their Arlington Heights home.

Pontarelli drove from Chicago to Minnesota on Friday to be with his friend.

"He's banged up, but he's going to be fine," Pontarelli said. "We're just happy he's going to be OK, and that he's going to be out of the hospital."

Meanwhile, Karge remains amazed at the magnitude of the accident.

"I think to myself, just little old Minnesota in the middle of nowhere, and this is a big ol' deal and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger," he said.

"I know it doesn't happen very often," he said. "One would hope that we're looking at our construction a little differently now."