Car Accident
On November 1, 2018 my friend and I were in a really bad rollover car accident, while on a road trip to Grand Junction, CO to visit a friend in college. It’s honestly a miracle we’re both alive. I was sleeping in the passenger seat and my friend was driving. I woke up to my friend swerving pretty crazily and I was yelling “oh my god” over and over again while she kept saying “somebody cut me off”. After that I knocked back out and woke up again during one of the rolls and knocked out again and the last time I woke up, we were in a field, facing upright, but in the opposite direction of where we were going. I know we rolled a lot because of how far the truck was from the road and our things fell out during the first roll because of how close it was to the road and we were still kind of far from our things. I wear glasses and had taken them off so I could sleep, so when I woke up, everything was blurry. My right eye was immediately swollen shut and my head instantly started pounding. I tried to get out but my door was stuck shut, but my friend immediately gotten out and came over to try and open the door, but it wouldn’t budge, so she broke the back window with her hand and opened it from the inside, because she couldn’t get it open from the outside. I crawled into the back and got out and was immediately greeted by a guy who had pulled over. About 7 more people came over to us and since I was the one with visible injuries, and my friend was walking and talking, they checked on me first. It took a little while to call 911, because we were in the middle of nowhere in Utah, 2 hours away from our destination. Finally they were able to call 911 and a highway patrol officer got there shortly after. He came over to check on us and saw we were okay so he went back to his car to try and get better reception for his walkie, but by the time he got back, my friend was on the ground, seizing. They were only able to get one ambulance out there and they loaded us up and took us about 45 minutes away. The whole time we were in the ambulance, my friend kept seizing. We met up at a medical center with another ambulance, which took me about another 45 minutes away and my friend was waiting to be airlifted to a hospital in Grand Junction. I got to the hospital and they immediately started doing scans. The cuts on my face weren’t deep so I didn’t need stitches, but they found bleeding behind my left eye. (Which was a little strange to me, because my right eye was swollen shut and had visible damage.) But slowly my left eye started to bruise. They believe my knee was what caused my eye to bleed, because I had a giant bruise on my knee, so it made sense. I had bruises all over my body and a pain in my back that was so unbearable. I learned that there was nothing they could do for my back, because of the type of injury I had. I had/have to wait 10 weeks for it to heal and it still may hurt after the 10 weeks. Luckily I was discharged that night, but while I was discharged, my parents were still 3 hours away, so I was stuck by myself. My friend stayed in the hospital for a week and I have only seen her twice since the accident. We don’t even talk anymore. I have tried but I guess she doesn’t want to talk to me and I’m not going to force her to. I now believe that she had fallen asleep and that’s what caused the accident. After looking back, I remember when I woke up while she was swerving, I didn’t see anything in front or beside us. I know she had not slept in about 36 hours. I don’t know if she was scared so she just said someone cut us off, or maybe she was dreaming, or maybe she was hallucinating, but I just have a gut feeling she fell asleep. Just like I had a gut feeling something bad would happen on our trip. It really sucks going through something like this, because my mental state has been more messed up than anything. It took awhile for me to get on a highway or sit in the front seat of a car, and I definitely don’t want to sleep in a car any time soon. And I know I can talk to anyone about it, but no one understands what I went through. And the one person who does, doesn’t want to talk to me.
