Getting Rid of Some Car-ma!

Arden and I were in a car accident last friday. A pretty bad one at that. Everyone is ok, thank God. We were headed up Creedmoor Rd. to get on 540 to meet a friend for lunch when we were going through an intersection and a lady was trying to turn left the opposite direction. She was supposed to yield to the oncoming traffic, being me, but didn't see us. I hit the brakes but I'm not sure how much I slowed down before plowing into her. My left driver side corner of my car hit her right passenger side corner, spinning her car and deploying my air bag. Then my car jumped the curb and ended up in the ditch, missing a telephone pole and two trees in the process!

Arden had started screaming upon impact. Probably because of all the noise and commotion, but man that gets your adrenaline pumping! I jumped out of the car, ran to her side of the car in the back, took the car seat out (she's still in an infant car seat) and questioned if I should take her out of the car seat or not for a few seconds. She was just sitting there screaming and I was worried that taking her out if she was injured was the wrong thing to do, but my instinct told me to take her out. As soon as I picked her up and held her for a bit she stopped crying. It was a very busy intersection, especially at lunch time, so there were several witnesses and people at the scene instantly and many very helpful bystanders. Fire trucks, EMS and police were there in minutes. The other lady was ok too, but a bit more shaken up emotionally it seemed. Arden and I got checked out by EMS and she seemed fine. We were a bit stunned for awhile, but then eventually Arden started to get pretty squirmy in my arms and wanted to get down. She played on the ground in the grass and was enjoying pulling up on the firefighters and playing with their hats and walkie talkies on their shoulders. Dave arrived and the car was towed off.

Now it's all the wonderfully fun insurance administrative nightmare stuff. We got a rental car, had to get the car towed to body shop, the adjuster looked at it and determined that it's totaled. We just bought that car almost exactly a year ago! And now it looks like we'll be getting a check this week and buying a new car and a new carseat which apparently needs to replaced as soon as one is in a wreck. The whole thing is a bit of a headache. Anyone that thinks buying a car is stress-free is wrong. Both times it has literally kept me up at night.

So again, what's most important is that Arden and I are both ok, and thank God for that. I've tried not to think about the what ifs in this situation. We obviously have some car accident karma (pun intended) to burn off and hopefully have done so.