It’s been a couple months now since my car accident, and I realized that the details get fuzzy the further past it I get. While part of me would love to forget it, I’m still dealing with some of the aftermath and do want to preserve the details somewhere.
There’s not much I can say about the commute that day. It was a Tuesday, and it was raining, so there was stop and go traffic on I-355. I was in the middle lane, because there’s a pot hole in the right lane a little bit after the toll, and you feel it more when you’re moving slow, so I try to switch back to my normal lane after that point. It was a little chilly, I had switched to my winter coat instead of a sweatshirt, but I wasn’t wearing a hat, and my gloves were in the pockets.
I was in the open road tolling lanes, very solidly stopped in traffic around 7am, when I happened to look in my rear view mirror and saw a pickup truck barreling towards me. I had just enough time to swear (and believe me, the word was not “fudge”) and glance at the distance to the car in front of me before the pickup slammed into me and pushed me into the next car. My steering wheel airbag deployed and caught my face, I could feel it on my lips. My foot airbag also deployed – I didn’t realize that existed – but it pushed my foot off the brake. After a stunned moment, I realized I was moving again as I slid into the back doors of two cars, one in my lane and one in the right lane. I swore again (still not “fudge”) and slammed my foot onto the brake.
When I was sure I was done moving, I shifted my car into park and turned off the engine. I think I glanced behind me and registered that the pickup was attached to my car. I’m not sure of the order immediately after that. At some point, the pickup driver came up to the trio of cars stuck together and called out, asking if everybody was OK. I remember turning the engine back on, so I could lower my window and respond – it hadn’t registered yet that the back window was gone, shattered across the back seat. I texted my co-worker to let her know I’d been rear-ended and would be late, called and left my boss a voicemail (as it turns out, he was behind me in traffic – he passed after the accident, but didn’t recognize my car because “the truck was still on [my] trunk”), then called my mother-in-law a couple minutes before my daughter left for school. This is, as it turns out, a way to panic your child; by the time I next looked at my phone, I had a text message asking for details. I declined the offer of a ride from my mother-in-law, since I had no clue what the process or timing would be, saying I’d call back later if I needed one.
That done, and with my front doors wedged against two other cars, I used my phone to take photos – of the pickup sitting on my trunk, and of the two cars I was wedged between. At some point, the pickup driver told me he was going to try backing up off my trunk, so I made sure my foot was solidly on the brake again, just in case. Once that was done, I sat waiting until emergency personnel came through checking on everybody. When asked if I was OK, I said I was, but was feeling a bit trapped. (I’m not claustrophobic, I just don’t like sitting idle.) Traffic had been passing in the left lane and on the shoulder; the firefighters closed off the shoulder so the accident vehicles could gradually move into that space.
Once the cars in front of me had moved, I turned the engine on again and eased over to the shoulder, and finally got out of the car. I walked around to the trunk, checked my work laptop (survived!), and took a couple photos. I sent a photo of my trunk to my co-workers and my daughter, and posted it to Facebook. And then I began the arduous task of gathering everything in the car into reusable shopping bags from the trunk before the tow truck picked up my poor car. I did fairly well – I missed my sunglasses and a chocolate in a back door pocket, and the tow truck driver later reminded me to grab my iPass. It was about an hour after the accident when I finally sat down in the tow truck; it was almost another hour before the police officer finished writing up the report with the details on all six cars involved.
I received the first copy of the accident report and permission to leave the scene, so I rode to the tow yard and called my insurance from their entry hall. If you’ve never had to do this, it is a tedious process, as the insurance needs all of the details from the accident report – details on all of the drivers and vehicles. Once that was done, we moved to the next step of arranging a rental vehicle through the insurance, and having the rental company pick me up from the tow yard. I ended up driving a lovely Kia minivan for most of a week.
I’d love to say that I then went about my day as normal. I did go to work, but only for a couple hours, as several coworkers were urging me to go to Immediate Care, particularly once a bruise started appearing on the bridge of my nose. As it turns out, I had a mild concussion and was told to take a few days off of work… and in no uncertain terms, not to participate in the black belt test three days later.