Crash and burn, girl. We're going down, down, down.

Since it has been a while since I’ve blogged, I’m kind of skipping ahead to the next weekend. I’ll summarize the week: we did lots of training! We had lunch with a couple of people this week who volunteer for ASA and I have realized that I officially SUCK at making small talk.

Sunday, August 10, 2008
Friday we had training with Julie Levine and also with Erica Butts, both of whom are awesome! We went out to lunch with them and the rest of the girls from the work and then had to head back to the office because we had so much work to do. We usually head out around noon on Fridays, but we just couldn’t today. All this past week Nicole and I have been making plans to go to Cedar Point, which is an amusement park in Ohio with the best roller coasters in the US (so I hear anyway) so once we got all of our work done on Friday we bought our tickets online and reserved a hotel. We were originally planning on driving up to Ohio on Friday night (4-5 hour drive), staying in a hotel and then hitting the roller coasters and driving home on Saturday. We decided to change our plans because all of the District Facilitators were in town for training that weekend and Christy invited us to eat lunch with all of them, so we made plans to drive up Sat night instead and hit the coasters and drive home on Sunday.

Saturday morning I got up early and went to an Overeaters Anonymous meeting. I was really nervous about going, but after the week I’d had in relation to food I decided I just needed to suck it up and go. I like it a lot and decided that I definitely wanted to try it again. They recommend going to 6 or so different meetings before getting a sponsor and deciding that the program is right for you. They gave me a packet for new comers with a list of meetings and times and I figured out that I’d definitely be able to go to at least 3 more before hitting the road, and while that’s still not 6, I was feeling optimistic about it. After my meeting, I went back to the office and picked up Nicole to head to the office and have lunch with the DFs. I’d already met two of the three DFs that I’m going to be working with this year and it was nice to meet the third and to get to talk more with the others that I already knew. Just before lunch started, Amber asked Nicole and I to give an impromptu presentation to the DFs during their training about the new recruitment strategies we have for the upcoming year. I think for only having 10 minutes to prepare for it we really did pretty well. I got several emails the next week telling me that we did a great job, so I believe it. After we got done at the office, Nicole and I packed our bags and hit the road!

Once we got to Ohio we ran into some clouds. It never actually rained on us, we were more just chasing the rain and getting the wet roads. It was annoying because even though it wasn’t raining, I still had to have my wipers on because of all the water getting splashed up on to me windshield. When we were exiting the highway I should have realized that I needed to be going slower than normal due to the wet roads, but I guess because it wasn’t actually raining I didn’t really think about it. We exited and the exit was one turns to the right and winds in a big circle. As we rounded the curve I realized that we were going too fast. As it was happening, I thought “Shit, I’m going too fast.” I tried to slow down some and I could feel the car life off the pavement and hydroplane. We started to skid off the road to the left and I though “Damn it. I hope we just fishtail a bit and don’t actually skid off the road, and if we do I hope it’s we’re able to get back on the road with no big deal and don’t end up stuck in the ditch”. I tried to maneuver us back on to the road and too late I remembered that when you start to spin you’re supposed to turn the wheel in the direction you’re spinning, not the opposite direction like your instinct would tell you to do. The next thing in know I felt the car slam on my left side, then we were upside down and then right side up. While this was happening, my thoughts we “HOLY FUCK! The car is rolling. I flipped the car. I can’t believe I’m such an idiot and I flipped the car. We could die. I’m going to die, like, cease to be alive and experience life anymore. This could be the moment I die. Oh my God, if we both die it’s all my fault. If we don’t die, we’re going to be seriously bloody and mangled. Oh my God, I’m going to be in so much trouble. I can’t believe I fucking did this. Things like this aren’t supposed to happen in real life. Not to me anyway. It’s all my fault”. Instead of my life flashing before my eyes in an instant, these are the thoughts that went through my head in an instant. It was seriously the scariest thing that has ever happened to me. Luckily, the car landed upright. When it did, I immediately unbuckled my seat belt and forced my door open as far as it would open, which wasn’t far. I squeezed out of the car, stood up and looked over the roof and saw Nicole’s head pop up on the other side. “Oh my God. We’re both ok. How are we both ok? I can’t believe the car landed up right. We are so fucking lucking. Thank God. Literally. How can people not believe in God after shit like this?”. Nicole and I established that we were both ok so she crawled back in to turn the car off (I was afraid it would blow up if we left it on) and fish out my phone (which was completely unharmed) so I could call 911.

I told the cops where we were and they asked if we needed an ambulance. Nicole and I couldn’t think past “we’re alive” and we figured that since we were alive and walking around then there couldn’t possibly be anything else wrong with us. Once the cop got there and saw the car (smashed and totaled, of course) he asked again if we thought we needed an ambulance. At this point dark bruises were popping up all over me and my back was starting to hurt a bit. Nicole’s back was hurting even more, so the cop said we needed to get an ambulance. While we waited for the ambulance, I grabbed my camera (which also survived the wreck) and took some pictures of the damage. When the paramedics got there they told us that we really should go to the hospital. They then strapped us to back boards and loaded us up. It was so unreal. Riding in the ambulance, staring at the ceiling and not being able to move, all I could think was that Nicole must be so mad at me for crashing the car and ruining our trip to Cedar Park (we were 10 minutes from our hotel when we crashed). I was convinced that she was really pissed at me and wasn’t going to want to talk to me the rest of the time we were in Indy for training. Then I started thinking about what my bosses were going to think. I just knew they were going to be mad at me for wrecking the car (it was a rental being paid for by ASA) and what the hell were we going to do for a car now? We have no way to get to the office. Nicole isn’t old enough to rent a car yet (silly girl is still 20) and I’m sure there’s no way Enterprise will ever let me rent from them, nor will ASA let me rent a car. All I could think was that I fucked everything up I started to cry and the paramedics thought it was because of the pain. When we got to the hospital they took me to a room and just kind of left me there to wait on a doctor. I had to pee so badly. We had been waiting to get to the hotel to potty and get food, but we never made it to the hotel. We crashed at almost exactly 7 and by this point it was 8:45. It was almost 10 before a doctor came in to see me, and in the mean time I’m strapped to the bed, uncomfortable and unable to move and I seriously thought I was going to set the bed. I thought about pressing the call nurse button, but I was afraid she’s tell me that she couldn’t unstrap me and try and make me use a bed pan. That was just not going to happen. After the doctor determined that I was ok and prescribed me some pain killers and muscle relaxers I was finally unable to go to the bathroom. That meant I was also able to look in the mirror and assess the damage to my body. I had a bruise on the left side of my forehead and a bit of a black eye, deep purple bruises on my left arm and lower left back/upper butt plus a cut on my left arm and some other bruises scattered around. The bruises on my back/butt were so intense that it hurt to walk due to the fact that it made my skin move. It was awful, but I was still so grateful that all I had were those bruises. I showed them to Nicole and she said it looked like someone beat the shit out of me and was really trying to kill me.

After the accident happened, Nicole called her mom, who then called her dad because he only lives about an hour from where we were. So her dad and her step mom decided to drive on down. They picked us up from the hospital and took us to grab some fast food and then to the hotel we’d made reservations at. We needed a room with two beds instead of one because her parents needed to be able to wake us up periodically to make sure we were ok since we’d both hit our heads. They were going to charge us an arm and a leg to switch rooms so her parents decided to just go to another hotel. As it turns out, every hotel in a thirty minute radius was completely booked. Her parents decided that since we were already half way there, we’d just drive to Michigan and they’d get us a hotel room and they’d go on home and just call us every couple of hours. It was about 1 by the time we finally got into a hotel room and were able to go to sleep. We were both so tired and in so much pain; we were miserable. Nicole’s dad also thought it would be funny to jerk the wheel every now and then to make the car swerve and pretend that he’d lost control. That’s something that is maybe funny a week after a serious accident, not a couple of hour afterwards. I was seriously so scared and uncomfortable, it was horrible. The next morning we went to breakfast with Nicole’s dad, stepmom and mom. It kind of sucks when something serious like this happens to you and you’re not able to be around your family but the person you’re with is. They were all very nice to me and her mom even got me flowers, but it’s not the same. After breakfast we hit the road. Nicole’s dad was going to drive us half way back to Indiana where Christy was going to meet us to bring us the rest of the way back. Christy wasn’t mad at all and said she was just glad that we were ok. And luckily, the sororities insurance covers the accident since it happened in a rental car that was being paid for by sorority funds and we don’t have to deal with my insurance company at all. My insurance might still go up some because I did get a $95 ticket for failure to control my vehicle, but they won’t know that it’s because I completely totaled a car, so that’s good.

So that was basically our weekend. We never made it to Cedar Point and people joked all weekend long that we took a rollercoaster ride of our own. Ha. Ha.