A message to my fellow teen drivers
June 5, 2008 is a day my family will never forget and a day I will never remember. It was the last day of my junior year and I had just finished my finals. A bunch of friends were going to Applebee's to celebrate becoming seniors. I rode with two of my friends to go pick up two other friends who needed rides.
I don't remember the accident - none of us do. But we are told that we stopped at our stop sign but for some reason pulled out in front of a semi that was traveling 55 mph. The truck hit me full in the passengers door of the mini van we were in. When the EMTs got to me, I was unresponsive and not breathing. That’s how my dad found me, in an ambulance, having my clothes cut off of me and the EMTs trying to get me to breathe. I was placed in Metro Life Flight and taken to MetroHealth where doctors would find I had a collapsed lung, a lacerated kidney, a lacerated liver, two fractures to my pelvis and two brain injuries, which were the worst of my medical problems.
I was in the pediatric intensive care unit for days before being moved to the pediatric floor and then the brain injury rehabilitation floor. It was very difficult for my family who basically dropped their entire lives to be by my side every minute of every day until I was released from the hospital on July 2, 2008. I spent every day on the rehabilitation floor attending speech therapy (trying to re-learn words and their meanings), physical therapy for my strength, coordination and fractures and occupational therapy (where I needed to learn to do simple math again after having been an honors math student). There is a period of about 15 days or so that I will never remember after the accident and a few before it even.
My recovery did not end there. I spent many months traveling back and forth to Metro for my therapy sessions - sometimes 4-5 times a week. I had to drop all of my honors classes and only take the 2 basic classes that I needed to graduate (English and Government). This was difficult to swallow considering where I had been before the accident, but with my therapists' help, I was able to graduate with the rest of my class and with honors on May 29, 2009.
I still have therapy at MetroHealth and continue to receive care from my doctors there. This accident does and will affect me for the rest of my life. Before my accident my family and I worked with a 4-H group called CARTeens that provides safe driving classes to teens and I still continue to do this, only now telling my own story, showing pictures of my accident and hopefully saving teens lives by telling it.
~ Kaitie
If I could give advice to teen drivers it would be to:
Pay attention to the road and the other drivers
Be careful, look once, twice, three times in all directions
Wear your seatbelt - all of us wearing ours saved our lives!
You do not have to be doing wrong to be in an accident - be defensive drivers!
Submitted by:
Kaitie O'Brien
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