As we drove down the road, I was pointing out sites to show my boyfriend as we reached an intersection. As I'm told, I may have run the stop sign that changed my life forever and I evolved into a new person, a person I really don't like. I was driving a 1986 Chevy Blazer when it was struck from an on coming car from the drivers side. The impact of the collision was so great that it buckled in my door 18 inches. We then spun around and the back of the blazer hit the side of the bank, near a telephone pole (at this point we assume my sister was thrown thru the side window) and then spun back around and the blazer was headed the opposite way we were heading.

My boyfriend slowly got out of the blazer dazed and confused as to what just happened. He walked around to my side of the vehicle to see if I was all right. What he found would be a terrible memory embedded in his head forever. He remembers seeing my body drooped over the steering wheel and my left arm hanging out the broken window. He took my bloody hand into his and told me that everything was going to be just fine (he couldn't have been further from wrong). As he dropped to his knees and tears falling down his cheeks, he bowed his head and realized he was kneeling in a puddle of blood. He looked up and saw the blood dripping from my head. "Oh God, please take care of her" he silently spoke to himself. He heard my sister in the background and looked over to find her laying in the field behind us. She was thrown from the blazer and just missed the telephone pole and landed on the ground. She ended up with scratches up and down her whole back side and was relatively ok. She and my boyfriend were really sore and stiff for a few weeks to come.

As for me, I wasn't as lucky as them. I was rushed to a near by hospital. During the ride there the paramedics seriously doubted that I would even survive the ride there. I was medically dead at the scene. When we got to the hospital, they shook their heads and decided that my injuries were so severe that there wasn't anything they could do for me there. They were not properly staffed or equipped for such severe trauma. I had to be life flighted to a bigger hospital that specialized in trauma victims. Again they said my chances of survival during the flight to the other hospital would be a miracle if I made it. Well, I guess God had other plans for me and made sure that I made it. At the other hospital I was induced into a coma which I stayed in for the next 6 weeks.

My mother, grandmother and boyfriend stayed at the hospital day and night, not leaving my side. They literally moved into dorms at the nursing school across the street. The doctors told them that I suffered severe brain trauma and usually people with such trauma to the head like mine, wouldn't make it. If I did, I would never walk, never talk, or eat on my own again. Basically I would spend the rest of my life in a bed as a vegetable. After they stabilized all my inner organs and got them working again, still was unable to breath on my own, I was to be transferred to an after care hospital. Basically it's a hospital within a hospital that specializes on comatose patients and getting patients to breath on their own without the use of a machine.

This was sometime in mid July that I was transferred. After there, what my boyfriend tells me, the healing hand of God touched me ( I was on prayer chains all over the country and in 3 others!). After 2 weeks there, I started to breath on my own more and more. Also started to slowly come out of the coma.

As I came out of the coma, I couldn't talk but I did write to them and told them what was on my mind ( I think I better leave that out of here, its rated R). I was told that I recognized my mother and grandmother, but I didn't know who the heck my boyfriend was or my father either and didn't know why they were there. I had nightmares of my boyfriend and was afraid that he was trying to kill me with needles. I told him to go away and never come back. Of course I still wasn't all the way out of the coma.

I finally snapped out of it and accepted my boyfriend as another guy I had met there, so in a way I fell in love with the same guy twice and in another way, I never fell out of love the first time.....weird huh? Up until the end of August, I was not able to get the trachea taken out, but at the end of August, I had it removed and breathed on my own 100%. I was taught how to walk again and worked up enough strength to be able to walk out of there and stand up and take my own showers. This new hospital brought everything back that I needed in order to go home.

I was released and sent home in my boyfriends care at the end of August. I spent a lot of time relaxing and my boyfriend even started a part time job.

On September 20th, my birthday, we all went to my grandmothers house and my boyfriend asked me in front of my whole family if I would marry him. Of course I did say yes and on May 15th, I became Tawna Paca. Today I am doing better, I am not currently working and I don't think that I ever will be able to go back to work. I can drive myself to my doctors appointments though. So I guess my new full time job is just to be a good wife and take care of our home.

I'm not the same person I used to be and can't do a lot of things she did, but I am dealing with life the best I can, still finding it hard to accept who I am now.

I'm just lucky to have such a loving family and husband, who takes care of me and sticks by me through all this. And I thank God for touching me in his special way.

Thanks for taking the time to read my story and God bless all.

Email Tawna