I was shocked to learn that I completely missed the 6-year anniversary of my car accident last week. For several years, it was a horrible anniversary that I anxiously waited to pass and would get anxiety the week leading up to it. I would refuse to get in a car on that day and I couldn’t help but let the emotions get to me and re-hash the horror of it all. But this year April 7th passed by without a second thought. Forgetting felt freeing in a way – and maybe the physical scars fading helped the mental ones fade away too. Now that the topic doesn’t make my head hurt and skin crawl, I figured it would be healthy to write about the experience that really shifted my life in a different direction.
In 2018 my family and I were making the 3.5-hour trek back from “Make it Miami” a weekend-long event for high school seniors considering attending Miami University. My older sister, a junior at Miami at the time, also happened to be having her sorority mother’s weekend which allowed us to use the trip down that weekend as a way to kill two birds with one stone.
After a great weekend touring my future college campus, meeting my sisters’ friends, and overall anticipating returning to Oxford, Ohio as a freshman myself in a few months, it was time for my family and I to pack up in our Honda Odyssey minivan and head home. At the time, I was 18 and my two younger sisters were 9 (Jillyan) and 14 (Jaclyn). We always tended to fight about who got to sit where and of course everyone was constantly arguing over who got the back seat to themselves. But for some unexplained reason – maybe it was picturing myself as a mature college student the whole weekend – but I decided to not argue and let my younger sisters sit where they pleased and take the last choice in the car for myself.
The drive went on like any other family road trip we’d taken throughout my life. On summer vacations we’d always drive the 12 hours to get to Myrtle Beach and my mom’s family lived in the south so none of us were strangers to being in the car for an extended amount of time. My parents chatted in the front seat as my dad drove, and all us kids kept our headphones on and entertained ourselves by scrolling on our phones or taking a nap with our heads resting against the window. We were only about 10 miles away from home – looking forward to jumping in the pool and maybe having a little campfire on a Sunday night before starting the next week of school and work – when things went horribly wrong.
You know how in movies when something bad happens, things are portrayed as moving in slow motion? At least for me, that couldn’t be farther from accurate. As I sat in the middle seat right behind my dad who was driving, I was listening to Lana Del Rey’s cover of “You must love me” by Andrew Lloyd Webber (a song to this day I cannot listen to). In the distance I saw the typical Ohio landscape. Sprawling cornfields, big farm houses, some smoke stacks from a factory in the distance. It was nearly summer and the sky was blue and the cornfields were right on track to be knee high by the 4th of July. A red pickup truck was heading down the road adjacent to us. Nothing was new or different, we were just nearing home and driving down the same county road that we did every Sunday to get to Church. That red pickup was getting closer to our car and we were getting closer to the intersection. Was it going to slow down? I thought to myself. It was getting awfully close. It was as if I’d asked that question out loud because over Lana’s voice in my headphones, I heard my dad not yell, not whisper but just sort of say in a tone of confusion “he’s not gonna stop.”
I really wish the scene had played out like in the movies. Where someone is hurt and there’s a quick flash on the screen and the very next clip is their eyes slowly flickering open in the hospital bed. The actor’s voice cracks a little as they ask “what happened?” But unfortunately, that is not how it went for me. I remember every last detail and if I think about it too hard, I can still feel my body lurching as that red pickup blew through the stop sign at full speed and smacked into the front left bumper of our family car. The feeling was eerily similar to being on a rollercoaster, speeding around a sharp bend. You can’t help your body from being pulled to the side by gravity. Your movement is only stopped by the seatbelt and you are at the mercy of outside forces that will decide on their own when they’re ready to slow down. We spun and spun and spun and for some reason I couldn’t close my eyes. That combined with the tight seatbelt seemingly strangling my stomach made me feel incredibly nauseous. What’s really crazy is my headphones never fell out, and when our spinning finally came to an end that haunting song was still blaring in my ears.
As the car filled up with smoke, we all looked around checking to make sure everyone was alive and able to move; and tank God we were. All our doors were jammed closed – except for the sliding door that we’d been putting off getting fixed. That’s the door we all climbed out of. I barely remember how we called the police or when they showed up or when the neighbor came and brought us blankets as we waited. I had the worst pain in my stomach that made me feel like I was one of those women in a magic show who gets sawed in half. The ambulances finally arrived and I was in such as state of denial that I tried to convince my mom that we didn’t need them and could all just go home and sleep it off and worry about being sore and the car insurance tomorrow. But of course, that is not what happened.
After being strapped to a gurney and being taken to the ER, we arrived at the hospital and things get blurry. I remember the medicine they gave me for the CAT scan tasting like liquid warm pennies. I remember not being able to drink anything even though my mouth felt like the Sahara dessert. I remember them telling me my liver was lacerated and I remember being transferred to the PICU and the superhero-themed wheel covers on my IV stand.
I don’t remember them discovering that my intestine had perforated and signing an emergency form giving consent for surgery. I don’t remember being intubated and sponge-bathed, and I don’t remember much from the first week after waking up. And for that, I am honestly grateful.
Over the past several years I’ve made it a priority to think more about the things I am grateful for from this experience rather than the negatives. I’m grateful that despite our injuries my entire family lived and has fully recovered. I’m thankful for the family and friends that helped us through and the stronger relationships that came out the other end. I’m grateful the whole experience made me lose 25 pounds and I kept it off. I’m thankful that I am now an overly-cautious driver and haven’t gotten in an accident ever sense. And I am also thankful that for the first time in 6 years I haven’t thought about it and can now move on in a way I wasn’t even sure was possible.
