Friday, October 15, 2010

My Life Protected

I was T-boned at an intersection. I was making a left turn from a residential street onto a main boulevard. My view was blocked, so after traffic cleared, I went to turn. Too late to stop, I looked up and found a white sedan flying at me down the street, had to be close to 50mph. I swerved, he swerved, and we actually swerved into each other.

The car hit me directly. The driver's side imploded, my seat was crushed, the door smashed in, the window shattered. My car spun out and I knew my hips were shattered. It hurt so much that I thought every bone in my body was broken, and the breath was knocked out of me so hard that I couldn't breathe for a minute.

While the car was still spinning, my friend in the passenger seat grabbed my hand hard and said "It's okay, pray! pray!"

"God," I gasped. I couldn't speak or breathe because it hurt too much, and I thought in my mind, 'please save me.' Just so you know, I don't have health insurance, and all I could think of was that my spine was snapped and I would lose everything to hospital bills. Then a miraculous thing happened. The car came out of its spin and straightened out, and drifted backwards across the street. I was frozen in the driver's chair, completely paralyzed by the shock of the impact, and I couldn't control the vehicle. The car drifted backwards on its own and straight into someone's driveway, where it stopped out of traffic. Basically, the car reverse parked itself.

Traffic continued more or less as usual. A few people pulled over to help, but my door was useless. Before I knew it, I was surrounded by firefighters who had to cut me out of the car. They rushed me to a trauma center at a county hospital. I was scared and ached all over. I had sharp pain in my lungs and I thought my ribs might be broken, since they were directly where the car hit, or at least my sternum from the seatbelt. However, after several x-rays and a cat scan, the doctors determined that there were no injuries other than cuts and bruises. No fractures, no ruptured organs, nothing. I was, more or less, all in one piece.

I was in pain all of last week and couldn't walk since my right leg is badly bruised, and my hips are a little out of whack, but nothing is broken.

My friend came out of the crash with her spine chipped in two places, a fractured neck, and a dislocated shoulder. She's in a neck brace and can't leave her bed. Thank God she has her family to take care of her, and thank God that I was spared from injury, because I don't think I could handle having broken bones right now. Apparently God agrees. My current burdens are enough!

God is amazing.

3 comments:

Tim Shey said...

Praise the Lord! I am very grateful that the Lord protected you in that crash. The Lord definitely has plans for your life.

Read Psalm 91; it is the psalm of protection.

Tim Shey said...

This happened in April earlier this year; it is from my High Plains Drifter blog:

"A Week in the Life of a Hitchhiker"

"In the past week, I hitchhiked from Helena, Montana to Dayton, Washington. The ride from Helena took me to Missoula. This guy's name was Harry and he came from the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northeast Montana. Harry was from the Assiniboine Tribe; we had a good talk. I told him that I was a Christian. He knew very little about Christianity. I told him about my faith in Jesus and that he should read the Gospel of John in the New Testament. I think he said that someone gave him a copy of the New Testament some years ago.

"It had been snowing that morning when I left Helena and there was some slush on I-90. Harry was going 85 miles per hour when he hit a patch of slush. All of a sudden, we were going sideways down the interstate. Then we went sideways down into the median (I thought we were going to roll his van over) and continued going sideways into the next lane into oncoming traffic. This big tractor-trailer was bearing down on us and I thought we were going to get T-boned by the tractor-trailer when, all of a sudden, the van straightened itself out. Harry took control and we drove on the shoulder to the next exit. That happened near Clinton, Montana.

"It was quite a rush for at least several seconds. It all happened so quickly. Harry and I looked at each other and heaved a sigh of relief. Harry said that my God saved us. I said, Praise the Lord!

"Harry was in a hurry to get to this hospital in Missoula; he had injured his back getting bucked off of a horse during his rodeo days. We went to this hospital where they gave him some shots in his back. I sat and talked with Harry as he lay in the bed. The nurses thought it was pretty funny that he had picked up a hitchhiker.

"After the hospital, Harry took me to his relations' place in Missoula and I slept on the floor that night. The next morning, his nephew drove me to Lolo where I started walking west on U.S. 12."

poetsforpeanuts said...

Incredible! I'm glad God protected you as well on the road. I really do believe that if it not time for something to happen, then it won't.

All I could think of in that moment of the accident was -- how am I supposed to fulfill my duty to God if I am paralyzed? Good to know that wasn't in God's plan. At least, not yet. *fingers crossed* :)