What happened to me: I found myself in a room surrounded by familiar faces and all looked concerned. It was a very slow realization that something had happened, something bad and it had happened to me. I knew questions were being asked of me but I don't remember what they were. There were so many.

I had trouble talking and it was in a whisper, but sometime I asked a question I was told almost three years later and I remember asking it...when I learned I had been in a car accident, I wanted to know if it, "Was it my fault?"

I don't remember the accident at all. All the memories of that year preceding the accident are still fuzzy. When someone would ask me if I remembered an event, I could remember it and fill in details surrounding it, but not the things leading up to it or after it.

I was told I had spent the night at my ex-husband's house. We shared joint legal and joint physical custody of our son. He was evidently preparing to go to Hawaii the following day on a Naval Reserve duty obligation. I had lost my job teaching two months before. It was May 16, 1997. I was preparing to exit the district at the end of that week. I had papers to grade and grades to figure for my final reports. I had been offered help by my ex as he knew the strain I was under and was being as supportive as he could in his way.

I was told, I started home at 7 am the morning of the 16th, with my 9 year old son. We were traveling a familiar route. We were on a simple two lane road with no shoulders as is very common in our area. The road was very hilly and visibility was not good due to the hills. I believe the weather was clear. A pickup truck following a van began passing the vehicle in front of him on a hill in a no passing zone. I was coming from the east. The van honked his horn at the pick up when he saw me approaching, but the pick up truck did not respond to the warning.

I saw the pick up truck and reacted by pulling my car into the ditch on the right side of the road. He saw me at the same time and took the ditch also with me and hit me head on...his pick up truck ended up on top of my car.

I was driving my mother's car and had I been driving my own, we would have surely died. My car had been on the blink for months and was unreliable so until I could fix it, I was driving my mother's. My son on the impact of the collision was planted in the dashboard. Neither of us were wearing our seatbelts, and this was one instance when it would have been fatal if we would have been. The steering wheel was planted in the seatback of the driver's side. I was thrown half out of the car. My son was trapped for almost two hours screaming from a ruptured spleen, fractured pelvis, fractured knee and the loss of massive amounts of tissue there as well as a broken jaw on both sides. I was going to sport a plate in my hip complete with 17 screws and a tbi.
I was comatose for the next 7 weeks.

I have memory of the beginning of my journey alive. My memory is spotty though. My long-term memory is intact for the most part and it can be stimulated through discussion or sight of photos.

I sent my daughter an email a year and a half after the accident and my computer was hooked up. It was something like this: Imagine you wake up from a long nap and everything has changed. You see faces that you are sure you trust and faces that are so familiar to you but they are changed. You are sure you know them, but you cannot find their names. Your children are still your children but they are almost grown and share nothing of your life, so you have nothing you can talk to them about and you don't share in theirs any longer...You feel lost.

I felt lost. I found trust in those I was around most. I felt I was searching for myself and my lost life. I had a parent of one of my students working where I was inpatient, and he spent many hours talking to me as I was coming out of the coma. It was him that told me I didn't have to get ready for work when I thought I was late as it was September and I was supposed to have already reported had I still had a teaching job. He also told me I didn't have a job. I had lost my life, my home, my animals, my children, my freedom of choice and the power to make any decisions about my future, my career and any hopes of regaining it. I lost me.

I will be alright though. I have gained a sort of acceptance of the things I cannot change. I am working to find a new place in this world and a new place in my children's hearts. With hard work and dedication to myself and my new life as limited as it can be sometimes, I am soaring to new heights.

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I AM A SURVIVOR!