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When most people think of victims of drunk driving, they think of those whose lives were taken prematurely. Hardly anyone thinks of those who are surviving victims of drunk drivers. While I have seen first hand and heard horror stories of mangled bodies left to pick up there shattered lives, I have been living my story for thirty-six years.

Alone in my car as I drove to meet my husband after work one night, I approached the bridge that linked two cities. My 1969 Plymouth Valiant was fully onto the bridge when a drunk driver passed the car in front of him and slammed head-on into my car, pushing me off the bridge and onto a steep bluff. When we came to a stop, my car was dangling over the bluff, threatening to slip into a deep ditch in the black of night. I was unconscious and pinned to my seat by the steering wheel that had been pushed in on top of my abdomen. I was three months pregnant. Any further along in my pregnancy and my story would have had a much different ending.

My parents had been visiting my aunt and uncle in a neighboring town and were approaching the bluff where my car rested, on a road parallel to the bridge. My father was a police officer at the time and often stopped to help if he thought he was needed, even though he was off duty and in a different county. While my mother waited in the car with my younger brother, my father climbed the bluff and instantly recognized my license plate number when his flashlight illuminated my tag. He yelled down to my mother, "It's Barbara."

My accident was in the days before the Jaws of Life had been invented. My father, along with several men who had stopped to help, literally took my car apart piece by piece until they could safely remove me from the front seat. My mother rode with me in the ambulance. I do not remember the ride. In fact, I do not remember the accident happening. All that I know of that night, I know from what I have been told by my parents. Was it a miracle that my parents were among the first people to come upon the wreckage? I believe so. Without my mother to tell the emergency room doctors that I was pregnant, my unborn child would have been subjected to high amounts of radiation from the x-rays taken that night.

Before the dawn of the next day, my parents, siblings, husband, and my in-laws would know the extent of my injuries. My pelvis was totally crushed, along with my left ankle. My right arm was broken. Because I would not be able to sit up, the doctors could not set and cast

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