First of all, thank you to all the well-wishers who immediately pounced on me as soon as I came into the chat room and got on AIM. RinkMail isn't letting me check right now, but thank you in advance for any e-cards or emails anyone may have sent. :-) I got to see a couple of them when impatient people PMed me their e-card codes. I'm home from the hospital, obviously, but I've got a ways to go before I'm healed. So I thought I'd let everyone know what's up. I may repeat some things Ellmyruh said in her post, but this way you'll know it's firsthand. Not to cast doubt on Ell's reporting abilities or anything, though.

Me

I'm fine, as Ell said. My left arm is pretty scraped up, I have stitches in my right elbow, a nasty painful bruise on my left thigh that makes it hard just to sit down or stand up, and minor scrapes around my face. I had a concussion, but it's gone now. And I'm discovering smaller aches all the time. But I could have come out of this a lot worse, or even dead. I'm not missing anything, and that's good enough for me.

The Car

The car is no longer a car. I haven't seen it yet, but my dad has promised to take me to the junkyard to view it. I'll try to get pictures, too. From what I've heard, it is a blackened, twisted frame of metal, with practically everything else melted off. When the accident was called in, the car was reported as small and black. It did not used to be either of those.

What Happened

I don't remember anything from the accident. The only evidence I have to show myself are my slight injuries, and a recurring dream I had before waking up in the emergency room (this is the only thing Ell got wrong-- that's when I had the dream, not when I went to sleep that night). Anyway, I kept dreaming that a car was coming toward me, which would have caused me to swerve. While I was in the emergency room, I kept asking the same questions over and over, not remembering that I'd asked them before. You've heard about the pillow one, but I was also apparently very concerned about the car, and kept asking about it as well. Later, I became slightly more alert, and my questions progressed to, "Have I already asked about the car?" My dad finally told me that it burned up so much that they didn't even need to call a tow truck, and that they could just pick it up and drive away with it. When I accused him and his girlfriend of being cruel, she said, "Yeah, but you won't remember it anyway." I did remember that.

We drove by the crash site on the way home from the hospital. It didn't stir any memories, but I'm a lot more impressed with myself now. I apparently drove straight off an embankment that was almost a straight drop-off. My dad estimated it as about a fifteen-foot drop (I thought maybe eight or nine, but I'd trust his estimation more than mine). There's a barbed wire fence at the bottom that I must have run through (it's broken now), and a charred tree, and the ground is also charred. Somehow I managed to climb out of the car and up the embankment. The first people along, as said already, were a nurse and an EMT. I was very lucky. I'm told I may never get my memory of the incident back, though.

The Worst Thing

The worst thing was when my IV began to get really really uncomfortable (they kept taking blood pressure on that arm, so I think maybe it was slightly dislodged). I called a nurse in to please move it or take it out, and she said, "Ok," and disappeared for several eternities. When she came back, she said something was ready yet, and disappeared for even longer. Finally she took it out, and said I must really have been unconscious when they put it in (I must have been, or close enough, because I don't remember it), because she had never seen an IV needle that big. She even went to show it to all the other nurses.

I suspect the really worst thing will be when it really hits me what happened. I don't think I've really realized it, yet. I wouldn't be surprised if one morning I woke up with a collective case of the shakes, and I won't be able to come out of bed all day. My dad honestly can't understand how I could have escaped the car, but I'm very glad I did.