“ THE TRAIN WON ” that’s what the news read on April 12th 2007, the day before I had got a phone call and it was my cousin Molly she wanted to talk to me about some problems that she was having. She wanted to come and get me and take me riding around, since she got her license early. I really didn’t want to go but my mom insisted that I go she said “its spring break and all you do is sit at home go and have fun!!!!” When she got to my house she was in her dad’s truck it was a F150. When I got into the truck she asked me what I was wearing and I said I’m wearing my new bra and my dad’s shirt and my dad’s coat and that I had my mom’s new digital camera. We left and just went ridding and we ended up in York SC at her grandmother’s house she wanted all of her trash taken out so we loaded up the truck and took out like ten bags of trash and did that about six time. When we got done with that we went back to her grandmother’s house and we got into the tanning bed. Since it was my first time in the tanning bed I told molly that all I was going to do was put my legs in and so she did the same. We were in there about twenty to thirty minutes and then I got a head ache and so I told molly that I wanted to go home. We were on our way back to my house and she wanted to go and get her mom’s car. So we went to her house and got the Hyundai Sonata and that is the last thing that I remember.
I woke up in the hospital and there were a lot of people over me and talking to me. I didn’t know what was going on and there was so many people asking so many questions. I didn’t know how to answer them or witch one to answer first. A nurse asked me what day it was and I said April 11th 2007, then he asked if I know what happened I said “NO” he replied with you and your friend got hit by a train. A police officer came in and asked me what happened and if I knew a way to get in touch with my parents I asked him what time it was and he said it was around six o’clock I told him to call my dad and I gave him his cell phone number cause I knew that he was already off of work since he got off at five o’clock. He called him and then came back in and said “I called him and left him a message and if he doesn’t call back I will need you to try and give me another number” I said “ok”. A little later he came back in and said “your parents are on the way they should be here in just a little bit but until they get here can I ask you some questions” I said “yeah”. “Were you driving the car?” Is the question that he asked first I said “no”. He said “do you have your license?” I said “no” then he said “who was driving the car?” I told him “molly”. Then my parents walked in and I don’t think that it really hit me until I seen my dad and I looked up at him and said “Daddy it hurts so bad” “he said I know baby”.
The doctors were taking all kinds of test and x-rays and exams and all kinds of stuff and there were people flowing in. My whole family was there and my parent’s friends and everyone had showed up and showed me support. Later that day a nurse came in and asked me to turn on my side after they took me off of the back board that the ems had me on, so I turned to my right side and she started pouring peroxide in my side and I didn’t know why until they gave me a mirror I had road rash that looked like raw meat and it hurt really bad. Later that day they moved me up to another room in the pediatrics center of the hospital. I stayed there for two more days and got to go home that Friday afternoon, but before I went home they took my catheter. Of course I had to go to the bathroom, my dad tried to help me up out of the bed so that I could go and he pulled on my left arm and I screamed, it hurt me so bad I started crying. My mom went out to the nurses’ station and had the nurses’ order me another x-ray, that’s when I found out that I had chipped a piece of bone out of my shoulder in the wreck. All of a sudden I started crying cause in rolled molly she had a big brace on her leg and a huge bruise on her left arm. Her family was behind her and they came and loved on me and cried with me and all of that. Me and molly cried with each other and then we started talking about what happened. We couldn’t determine what happened, we heard a knock at the door and it was the police officer that was with me in the ER and he told us that molly was driving the car, which is how she shattered her right ankle. She was texting and driving and her parents started yelling at her and took her phone away. They left and we were on our way home, I started thinking and I couldn’t understand how I survived that wreck. You see it every day how people text and drive and it just amazes me how it is seen in most cars.
According to Http://dontdriveandtext.org the study released in July 2007 and conducted with more than nine hundred teens from twenty six high schools nationwide, reviled that text-messaging while driving is become as dangerous as drinking and driving in terms of inhibiting a teen’s driving abilities. Cell phone use accounts for two thousand six hundred vehicle fatalities and three hundred thousand collisions annually. It seems as if every time I turn the news on another teen is killed over driving wrong or texting and driving and or something that could have been easily avoided. So my message to everyone is please learn from what I had to learn from it is not a happy place to be and I promise you will not like it when you get there I was fortunate to not lose my life you may not be so lucky.
