I need to lead this off by saying my wife is a bad ass! She handled a survival situation like a pro and took the right steps to get to safety. She is my rock and my soul, and i am so happy to have her in my life.
Saturday night, while driving home from work. My wife lost control of her vehicle and went into a ditch. She was about a mile from home. The entire ground was coated in a thick sheet of ice, and walking on it was impossible. There was no signal on her cell, and she couldnt stay in the car, because the car was almost sideways and looked as if it was going to roll down the hill. She did only what she could do. She walked.
It was wet, near 20 degrees F, and she had to go up hill. The road was impossible to walk on, so she walked through the drain ditches....
Most of the trip was up hill. At her halfway point, she had to crawl on her hands and knees through the ice up the hill just to have traction.
She made it home just before i was to leave to go look for her. She was about 45 minutes later than usual and i knew something wasnt right.
She was in light shock, her hands and feet started to get numb, and she was close to hyperthermia, but she was safe. She made the right choice.
To top things off. When she went to get out of the car, the door swung back and closed on her hand, and the handle is half broken so she couldnt open the door. She had to rip her fingers from the car door jamb. Her fingers on her right hand were smashed and slightly mangled, but should heal in time. She crawled through and up a ditch using that hand...
She was home. She was safe, but she almost wasnt. In an instant...i almost lost the one thing more precious to me than my own life. Never again will we travel these roads in the cold like this. It was like a sheet of black ice miles long with bends and twists of a rough mountain road.
We have to get it dislodged from the ditch today, and i doubt the car is drivable. It will put us in a really bad spot losing a car, and i am in hopes to have a solution quickly.
Moving here to the Ozarks took pretty much every cent i had, and we werent expecting something like this to happen, but we will figure it out, i hope.
I could have lost her, but we got very lucky she went into the ditch when she did. A couple more feet and she would have dropped another 8-10 feet into a culvert and been trapped.
Give your loved ones a hug today, things can happen so quickly that you may miss an opportunity. Im glad i was able to tell my wife i loved her again...
