After around 19 years of safe driving I experienced my first accident. I was driving towards the Milford Oval when I turned a slight corner and noticed a gold car waiting to turn left out of a church parking lot. As I approached the lot I thought there’s no way he'll would turn since I was driving on the road. Unfortunately he never checked left (he was looking right to see when traffic coming from the oval which was the opposite direction would clear up). As I approached the parking lot, suddenly I saw his car jet forward in front of me. My first thought was “this isn’t possible!” Followed by “I'm going to hit that car". I slammed on my brakes but he was too close and I was driving around 30 mph on the road.
I hit him with my passenger front side to his drivers side. Luckily neither of us were seriously injured, and more importantly neither of my children were with me at the time! My airbags went off and as a result I suffered a concussion from the impact or my head hitting the airbag. I noticed smoke coming out of my air vents and turned off the car. I called 911 and got out of the car. There had been a man exiting his car garage across the street who witnessed the crash. The police came and got our statements. The other driver said “I'm sorry, I looked left, I looked right, I didn’t look left again". He said he had insurance (not mandatory for some reason in NH).
Turns out, his policy had been canceled due to non payment so in the end my insurance will have to absorb the cost of my car (which was totaled).
It was such an overwhelming and scary event, I'm so glad it wasn’t worse, but it definitely rattled me. Having a concussion was one of the strangest things I've gone through. It really shows you how much your brain does every single day. My brain was in a fog everyday for about a week, throbbing if I did too much, looked at screens, or went outside without a hat and sunglasses. My ears would ring if I clapped too loudly for my kids (turns out I clap for them a lot while they play haha, I noticed this everyday as I recovered, how much my own clapping hurt). More on my concussion here, I never really understood what having one was like, but in the words of my brother when I called him to ask what the symptoms were “if you think you have one, you do". You can really feel your brain hurting, it's so strange!
I have to say I was really impressed with our insurance, they were very kind and professional. They gave us a fair evaluation for our car, now we’ll have to go car shopping! Here are a few pictures from when we went to clean out the car of our personal belongings, interesting to see how the airbags deploy!
Saying goodbye to our great family car, thankful for my health and that the kids weren’t with me during the accident, and hopeful we find a new car!