My Car Accident

When I was
sixteen, I had my first car accident while attempting to help my
mother.

My mother had two cars and her second car was due for
maintenance and she had asked me to follow her to her appointment in
her second car and then bring her home. We were on the road for less
than five minutes when I had my accident, we were turning left on to
a local main street and when I looked the road was clear. But as I
began to make my left turn things went from “fine” to “awful”
with blinding speed.

Cresting a small
hill immediately to my left was another driver doing well above the
local speed limit of 55 MPH. I don’t remember too much about the
thought process of what to do in that situation, but I pushed the
accelerator to the floor in an effort to get out of the way. I did
not succeed entirely and was hit in the rear, driver side quarter
panel.

The speed,
location and inertia of my turn combined with the efforts to making a
left turn in the first place had the car spin completely around two
and a half times. I ended up in the correct lane, but facing the
wrong direction. During the accident my glasses had shot off my face
and miraculously folded themselves up in the window of the
driver-side door. This meant that I was unable to look around the car
and see what the damage was.

I was so stunned
by the accident that I was having difficulty with my seatbelt and
with the ignition. As mentioned, I’m not certain about the specific
timeline but when emergency responders arrived, I was attempting to
unbuckle my seat belt and get out of the car. The first person there
was a police officer that was attempting to get an idea of my
physical and mental state and if I had lost consciousness. Because I
wasn’t aware of the damage to the car at the time, I was struggling
to get out until the officer told me, “If you don’t stop moving,
I will knock you out myself and tell the paramedics that I found you
that way. Stop. Moving.”

Obviously, I
stopped moving. The Paramedics arrived and I was strapped to a
backboard and then taken to the hospital to be checked out.
Miraculously I had no more serious damage than whiplash and a
hair-line fracture in my sternum.

Three weeks later
I finally saw the car and was both terrified and fully understanding
of why the officer had acted like he had. The car that I was in was
completely flattened in that rear quarter. The entire rear
driver-side wheel was touching the passenger-side wheel. The entire
backseat had been compressed to the point where both doors were
touching. It was an eye-opening and terrifying experience that
changed the way I have driven ever since.