My Car Accident

At about 3:20 PM on Sunday August 4th, 2013 I fell asleep on I 85 heading back to West Jordan from Eagle Mountain with Braxton. I worked the graveyard shift the last 4 nights at the hospital and didn't have much sleep the day before or the day of the accident. It's hard to call it a car accident because I've had such a clean record but I've finally came to terms in calling it that now. Even when I told Jackson the first time I talked to him on the phone, I said, "I hit a pole."

So I fell asleep and woke up to our car hitting the gravel, by than it was too late to stop myself from hitting the pole that was directly in front of me. I split the pole in two and went right over it, as you can tell by the tire marks. As you look at all the other pictures the tire marks help tell what happened.

Continuing onward past the pole I hit, you can see the next pole coming up. As well as the tire marks. I'm lucky I didn't flip.

I turned around and took a picture of the pole I hit.

Moving onward, seeing the 2nd pole I almost hit straight ahead of us. Tire marks.

More tire marks, you can see I barely missed that pole.

At least at the time I thought I missed it. Obviously I didn't miss it enough, as you can see on the pole, the red stuff is the remains of my left side tail light. I think I scraped the back left side of my car too.

This is a picture standing right next to the second pole, if you look closely, you can see the pole I hit on the left and the remains of it on the right. It's a pretty far distance.

If you couldn't see it, I circled it. The left circle is kind of big, so its the little dot close to the top of the inner circle.

Moving on past the pole, I swerved back into the road.

And went clear to the right side.

When I got to the right side of the road I over corrected and started spinning counter clockwise. Thank goodness it's a low riding Honda or I probably would have flipped.

When my car stopped spinning I was facing any oncoming cars that were behind me. As I said before, luckily there were no cars be hind me or close by. (Jackson later counted 175 walking steps from where we think the car stopped to where I hit the pole). My car shut off on it's own. Luckily I was able to turn the car back on and turn it around to face the right direction on the highway off to the right side of the road. I sat there parked because I was in shock and had adrenaline pumping. As I'm parked there I wanted to see the pole I hit, so I put the car in reverse and started to back up slowly. As I'm backing up I could see that the car was leaking fluid, as you can see in the picture below the trail of fluid. At this time, Jackson called me in about a minute after I hit the pole just to tell me he's off work.

As I'm reversing, back to where I hit the pole, I keep seeing more fluid, so I knew that the pole popped something in my car. My first instinct was that it was gas. So I shut the car off and got Braxton out of the car incase the car was to explode.

So here I am standing on the sidewalk in the 90+ degree weather in tears waiting for Jackson to come. I felt worse for Braxton because it was so hot. He of course had a smile on his face and was luckily asleep when we hit the pole. He seemed just fine and never cried. My happy amazing baby!

Than I looked at the front of the car and was literally shocked at the damage. I had no idea the pole would damage the hood of the front of my car. I thought for sure the bumper but not the hood.

You can kind of see the filter in there dented upwards.

Looking at the engine, honestly nothing looked damage, but we'll soon here what all needs to be fixed. Because I'm sure the remains of the pole scraped up the bottom.

And we can't forget the second pole damaging the left tail end of the car. In this picture, you can already tell that the light cover is broken off.

Overall, Braxton and I were lucky. I was in a skirt because I was coming back from a baby blessing and so a husband, wife, and family friend to the husband and wife saw me and pulled over to ask if I needed help. I of course said I was fine but certainly didn't look fine. They all got out of there car to help out. The guy came and smelt the fluid leaking from the car and said it was radiator fluid. Me having no car knowledge at all asked him if I could still drive it back since it's not the gas tank. He said, "Not unless you want to damage the engine". So he opened the hood and said the rest of it looked good from what he could see. They than asked me if I needed a ride home, I was pretty reluctant for awhile and said no but they wouldn't leave and kept saying I shouldn't stay out in the heat with the baby. Which by than I knew they were right. I felt horrible for Braxton, but he of course was just hanging out in his car seat just smiling at our new friends we found. I went ahead and decided to take them up on the ride and got a ride back to our house. I called Jackson and told him just to head to the house until I got there and that we'll come back and look at the car later together.

When I got home, I was pretty shaken up and sat on the stairs for awhile. Jackson hugged me and wanted me to go lay down but I couldn't because of the shock of it plus we needed to do something about the car. Jackson than grabbed Braxton who still was happy as can be, who started laughing at the dogs even, and fed him. So we're thinking nothing is wrong with Braxton. After we fed him we called the bishops wife, who was also our realitor for the house we bought, asking her if she was busy and if she could watch Braxton for a little bit while Jackson and I go back to the car to take pictures and call the insurance and figure things out. She of course was super sweet and watched him for us.

When we got back to the car, there was already a note on the car telling me the car was parked illegally and that I needed to call Officer Simon. So when I did, he said I'm never to leave the seen of an accident and I never thought of it as an accident at the time as to why I didn't think to call the cops in the first place, plus I told him I had my 5 month old in the car and didn't want to keep him in the heat. He was really nice about it and came back to where my car was parked after I called him. I told him I was an RN and worked a graveyard shift at St. Marks the night before, than taught primary at my ward, and then went to a baby blessing. Luckily, Officer Simon knew St. Marks hospital and started to ask me if I knew some of the security officers there at the hospital. I said to him, "No, but I'll be sure to tell them that you caught me". Which made him laugh and I think helped the situation a bit since he did say at the end of our conversation, "I'm letting you off the hook this time, but do call the next time you get in an accident. We would of put your baby in our air conditioned car." I told him I would. The officer was really nice to us, I was really lucky to have a nice police officer that found my car after I left it. By this time, the people that were towing the car has arrived and we left.

When Jackson and I bought the car we decided on making it have full coverage insurance since it's our number one vehicle. Lucky for us to have full coverage on it, the insurance company said that we just need to pay the auto body shop a 250 dollar deductible and the auto body place will charge the rest of it to the insurance company. Towing and a rental car was also covered in our insurance plan. So I went and got our rental car earlier today since I do have to go to work this week.

I'm overall doing okay, my neck is a little sore along with my back, but I've always had a bad back so nothing new there. Braxton doesn't show any sign of injury, I had him buckled in the car the way he's suppose to be buckled. Jackson and I are just happy there were no other cars on the road at the time I hit the pole because it definitely could have been a lot worse. And as my friend nicely put it yesterday to me, "You need to stop trying to do everything." So I will do my best not to, I'm a people pleaser and like to make everyone happy. At least I always try to.

I also want to thank our family and friends who said a prayer for us yesterday that we would be okay and that everything will work out. Slowly but surely we are recovering and things are working out as far as figuring out what to do with the car etc. I especially want to thank my heavenly father for watching over Braxton and I yesterday while we were out on the road, it could have been a lot worse and I know he had a part in keeping us safe, because I have no doubt that the car should have flipped. The advice for the day, "Don't sleep and drive".