This summer I woke up one morning and decided that I wanted to go out shopping. If you know me that is not a normal thing for me to want to do so I took advantage of my craving in the hopes that I might find myself some nice close for me to wear. My biggest problem with this is that I never have a lot of money because I am a saver. I save for no reason at all and to be honest it makes no sense to me. I think it has to be the assurance that when I do find something that I absolutely have to have, I can go out and buy it for myself.
So I got up and I decided I wanted to go to the outlet stores on the other side of town so I started my drive out. Once I got about half way I heard screeching tires over my music. I didn't know where they were coming from so I looked on both sides of me and then in my rear view mirror where I saw to my horror a car completely out of control just about to hit me. My first instinct was to hit the gas and hope to god this isn't going to be a bad accident but that wasn't the case. I hit the gas to get out of the way but as I did I saw the car go face on with the median beside me and bounce off to not only hit me but spin me a little. The car that hit me was going so fast that even after he hit me he spun around a couple times on the pavement before his car finally just stopped.
Through the shock of it all I had no idea what to do or how to react till I realized I was still driving! So I pulled over to the side of the road ON THE HIGHWAY, and sat there in my car to make sure that I wasn't hurt. My first instinct was to call my best friend at the time Brendan. He always knew exactly what to do in situations like this. So I called him but then hung up right away because I realized that the guy that hit me could be seriously hurt. So I got out of my car, not even bothering to look at the damage and started to run as fast as I could go the damaged car in the middle of the highway. I kept telling myself, the worst is over, nothing bad can happen anymore, I am alright. Once I got to the car I noticed that he was still in the car so I reached in and asked him the first three questions that came to my head. 1) did you hit your head? 2) are you having trouble breathing? 3) can you get out of the car?
His car was completely totaled and there was nothing going to save it now. Both of his airbags had come out, both of his bumpers had been ripped off, his front tires were ripped off his car and looked very weird and the hood of his car did not look like a hood anymore. He turned to me and said were you the one I hit? He wasn't making to much sense at the time and I could tell that he was in a little bit of shock but I did answer all of his questions and helped him out of the car. Thankfully we had an off duty police officer and fire fighter on the scene with us who called in the accident and made sure that we were not seriously hurt. We also had another stranger that saw the whole accident stop to make sure we were ok and to talk to the police when they got there.
After the call was made it felt like it was just minutes till we heard the first set of sirens. They ended up having to close the highway down, there was two fire trucks, 4 police cars and 2 ambulances. I had never been in a accident before so I didn't know if that was protocol for a highway accident or not. After we got everything cleared off and the police told me that my car should be safe to drive home they took my statement of what happened and I instinctively drove to Brendan's house. At this point I still hadn't cried yet so I knew it was going to happen in full force very soon after that. Once I got to him and he hugged me I just feel apart in his arms.
There ended up being close to $3000 worth of damage to my car after everything was finished getting fixed. A few months later as well I found more problems from the accident but was lucky that I as able to claim it under insurance because my car wasn't even 2 years old yet.
I think that the accident really opened my eyes to how I will react in high stress situations and how I will deal with things under pressure. It proved to me that I am a lot stronger then I let off to be and even though I never want to be in an accident again, I am glad that it happened to me.
