Suspended Behind the Wheel
How my life flipped upside down after a major accident…literally.
Story and photos by Tristyn MacDonald
While I gripped the headrest in front of me with what felt like the entirety of my strength, time slowed to almost a complete standstill. Items around the car were violently sucked back to the ground by gravity. So was I, back to my seat. I’ll never forget the looks on my friends' faces trying to process what had just happened. Their hair was showered in spilled drinks and broken glass. The smell of smoke emitted from the freshly shot airbags contaminated my nose.
People mindlessly get into their cars every day. Experiencing a major car accident makes driving a far more mindful action. In the months after my accident, every time a vehicle inched out a little too far or turned too fast my heart jolted out of my chest and I was on the verge of a panic attack. Even now, I wrestle with relaxing in a vehicle when I’m the passenger. I’m often transported back to the scene like it was yesterday when something triggers me. A car accident can alter your life mentally and sometimes physically.
For Cristie Thuren, it ended in a helicopter trip to the hospital with a broken neck. Thuren, a mom of two and 41 years old at the time of her accident, lives in Bainbridge Island, Washington. She tried to process the situation as she rode in the ambulance from the scene, “I was thinking about my kids and I was really disappointed, I was not so much scared or angry, just really disappointed that this terrible, terrible thing happened and thinking that this is it.”
Sixteen years ago, Thuren hit a patch of black ice and got thrown into oncoming traffic. “I remember it like it was 15 minutes ago,” she said. “I remember what I was wearing, where I was going. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, I'm early. When I get there, I can have time for a latte.’”
Traumatic memories are stored differently in the brain than other memories. This is why people are often able to recall strange details from a traumatic event compared to a regular day. The Counseling Directory offers an article titled “Understanding How Traumatic Memory is Stored in the Brain” by Sally Edwards.
“The emotional weight of a traumatic event leads to stronger and longer-lasting memory imprints,” Edwards wrote. “The amygdala is the part of your brain that handles emotion and can trigger your fight-or-flight instinct. The amygdala doesn't just help put emotional pieces into the memory; it also helps make the memories vivid and full of sensations.” People become hyper-focused in these moments of immediate danger.
I remember certain details of my accident oddly well. Like how my friend had just cracked a Yerba Mate drink, only to be flown in the air moments later, and I was drafting a text to my boss when, like Thuren, we hit a patch of black ice. The car slammed into the concrete barrier and flung us the other way. Being upside down felt viscerally wrong and unnatural. We rolled one and a half times over. If the car had not been as structurally sound as it was, we would have all been crushed in the process.
“It makes sense to be terrified of getting in a car,” Thuren said. “Every time you get in a car and you're going over fifteen miles an hour, there’s a chance that you are going to kill someone or someone's going to kill you.”
No matter how unnatural driving may seem, it has been integrated to be unavoidable in our society. Yet, with its convenience comes a near-death experience at your fingertips.
Not only is the weather out of our control, but so are the actions of other people. You never know what is going through the minds of other drivers. Maya Bachmeier-Evans' school bus in her sophomore year of high school got bull-dozed off the road by a car full of teenaged boys trying to catch the light.
“I've accepted it now,” she said. “I was definitely angry about it because the people driving were just trying to catch the light and they just hit us.”
The students watched with one eye closed as the other driver’s limp body was lifted from the car. She said the scene of her bus driver passing out paper towels to everyone with blood and tears streaming down their faces is “burned into my memory,” and that “you don't feel like something like that can ever happen to you. I never thought that I would get hit on my school bus, of all things.”
This accident left Bachmeier-Evans with a minor concussion and a lifetime reminder to be a careful driver. These are the sort of things you never expect to happen to you until they do.
Traumatic events can have an ever-lasting effect on you and your body. It’s important to exhaust the resources and support around you after experiencing a traumatic accident. Following my accident, I had to take extra steps to prevent my everyday anxiety and depression and receive chiropractic care. What helped the most was surrounding myself with people who love and care for me. If it weren’t for family and friends, especially those who I went through this experience with, I wouldn’t be where I am today.