I moved forward.
And then there was nothing but impact.
A pickup truck ran the red light from the cross street, hitting the driver’s side of my car with a force that felt almost unreal, like something out of a movie rather than something happening to my body in real time. Glass shattered. Metal folded. The world tilted violently, and then it simply… stopped.
When I woke up, it wasn’t all at once. It came in fragments—light that felt too bright, voices that didn’t quite make sense, the steady, rhythmic beeping of machines that seemed to anchor me to something solid when everything else felt disjointed. Pain came later, layered and complex, but in those first moments, there was mostly confusion and a strange, distant awareness that something had gone very wrong.
Doctors would later explain the details in careful, measured tones. Two fractured ribs. A partially collapsed lung. Internal bleeding that required immediate surgery. Words like “critical” and “lucky” and “close call” were used in ways that suggested I had come much closer to dying than I had any memory of experiencing.
