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Originally posted by prozacrat

I think I told this story a while ago, but since it's applicable...

A little over a year and a half ago my girlfriend and I were driving home and were on the interstate (going rougly 65-70mph) Neither of us remember anything more than that, but what investigators put together was the following: We were approaching an overpass and got into the left lane to make way for a car that was merging. At the same time, an incredibly drunk driver was racing south in the same northbound lane we were in. We hit head on on the overpass and our car spun back into the right lane, perpendicular to the interstate where we got t-boned by the car that was merging. At some point the cars stopped moving. Neither of us remember any of this. We both passed out, and have no memory of anything past us getting on the interstate. I was, however, talking to my cousin/bandmate on my cell phone at the time, gushing about the new wah pedal I had just purchased that day. Apparently upon impact my phone flew from my hands and was imbedded in the windshield in front of my face. My cousin listened for about the next fifteen minutes. He heard me and my girlfriend wake up. He heard my girlfriend screaming. (I don't blame her. Both her femurs were snapped and her legs were bent up over themselves.) He heard the rescue crews say they needed the Jaws Of Life because the dashboard was in her lap. My cousin was four hours away and couldn't do anything. For a few minutes after the accident he didn't hear anything, which really scared him. Fortunately we were just unconscious. It turns out that rescue crews arrived rather quickly, but they were all trying to get the drunk driver loose, who had gotten his hand caught in his car door. He was making a big fuss. Nobody bothered checking what was left of our car because everybody thought there was no way anybody would survive. Our car was just a crumpled little wad of metal. But the woman who t-boned us managed to limp over to our car and point out to the medics that we were alive. That's when they got some people to come help us. My roommate happened to drive by right after it happened (which was odd, because we live an hour away from where it occured) and he said he felt bad for whoever got killed in the really messed up car, thinking, as well, that nobody could have survived it. I talked to the EMTs and the highway patrolmen later on, and all of them expected to be pulling corpses from the car. Somehow we survived, though. Had we been hit a few yards in either direction and we would have flown past the guard rail down a 40 foot embankment. My girlfriend broke both her femurs, fractured her pelvis and shattered her tailbone, ruptured her spleen and liver, and collapsed her left lung. She spent two weeks in the hospital, and a month in a wheelchair. She had made a pretty much complete recovery within a few months, at which point she was crowned Ms. Brookings (the city in which we reside), so that was pretty neat. My injuries were far more minor. A contusion on my right lung, a broken rib, and a broken collar bone. I broke my #2 rib on the right side, and had I broken my #1 rib, less than an inch away, I would have severed a major artery and bled to death within seconds. So that's pretty cool that I didn't. However, despite several surgeries, my collarbone has still refused to heal, due to a number of unlucky circumstances. I just got back from the Mayo Clinic last week, and the procedure they can do to fix it is too risky at this point, and they want to just see how normal I can live with a broken collarbone. (I'm right handed, too.) The drunk driver was uninsured, so that makes everything a bit more difficult to deal with, but despite all that, I still consider myself living on borrowed time, so I can't complain about that. Your whole life takes on a kind of surreal tone when you KNOW you should be dead, but you aren't.

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Originally posted by VoVat

I wouldn't exactly say it was a near-death experience, but I was once riding in my mom's car when she accidentally tried to get on a highway via an off-ramp. Fortunately, she could drive over the median to the on-ramp before a car going in the other direction could hit us.

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I was all out of luck, like a duck that died. I was all out of juice, like a moose denied.

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