The most terrifying moment of my life was when I was in a car accident about four years ago.
My husband and I were on our way west on I-10, and had just passed a semi-truck, when we hit a patch of water on the interstate that caused our car to hydroplane.
The entire event felt like it took 10 minutes, but it probably happened in less than a minute or two.
In moments of stress on the road, when someone else is driving, I find myself close my eyes, so I can't see something terrible if it is going to happen. In this situation, my eyes, for some reason, were peeled open, and no words came out of my mouth.
Our car started sliding into the right lane, flipping us around 180 degrees, so that at one point, we were looking straight at the semi-truck coming at us. All I could think at that point, was that we were going to get hit head on.
Our car continued turning on the road, sending us to the shoulder, now facing the same direction as the traffic, and the semi-truck fly right past us. I thought for a moment, "Oh my gosh. We're stopping. We are going to just drive away from this." At the end of that thought, my husband yelled, "Hold on! We're going to roll!"
I tried to grab onto the strap at the top of the window, but I couldn't grab it, as the car started rolling diagonally, all alongside the shoulder of the road. My window broke out and I found myself reach outside the window to grab the frame of the window to hold on. (Let me interject that this is where wearing seatbelts is a good thing. Had we not have been, we would have both flown out the window and been crushed by the car rolling.)
I kept telling myself I needed to pull my hand it, or it might get broken, as the car was rolling on a diagonal, but as quickly as we were moving, I couldn't get it back in.
We finally stopped rolling and the car ended up on its right side, me on the ground side, and my husband up in the air. The first thing he said was, "I wish we'd taken my car." He said this because it had a better ABS (anti-lock braking system) and we probably wouldn't have slipped in the water.
My hand was laying on the ground as were the contents of my purse, and my husband thought my hand was broken seeing blood on it. I had only cut it slightly on some glass. We both seemed in pretty good shape. I then tried to call 911 from inside the car, to alert someone to come, only, sadly, the operator couldn't hear me! How frustrating that was!
A man appeared at our back window and offered to help us out that way, as it was broken out, and really the only way we could get out. As we got out, the drivers of the semi were running our way to help, having parked further down the interstate. What a shock it was, to see your car on its side on the interstate!
I realized then too, that I had quite a lump on my head.
The passersby stayed with us until help arrived, and the fire department wanted me to go to the hospital to have my head looked at. They found I had a mild concussion. My husband ended up with only one scrape to his leg, where he crawled back into the car to get our personal belongings.
We were really lucky. You hear almost every day of rollover accidents, and people being ejected from the car and killed. Even with us wearing our seatbelts, the semi truck could have hit us head on, no fault of theirs.
It was the most terrifying moment of my life, and now, I am cautious not only of my driving, but those around me, in case something happens to them on the road, and they endanger me too.
What is a story of something amazing, crazy, or scary that has happened to you?
