When a Family Faces the Unthinkable: Trauma, Grace, and Recovery

July. Summer vacation. We were seven hours from home, the kind of road trip where there are still five hours to go and all you can think about is getting to hug your family in Nashville. Then the storm hit.

The road was slick, the tires lost grip, and before I could even process it, we were hydroplaning—spinning across lanes of traffic. (Yes, I screamed “Jesus!”) The Expedition went sideways into the ditch and slammed against a tree.

Shock has its own silence, even when noise is all around. The crash detector went off, my voice shaky as I told the operator there was blood, that we were very hurt, that a child was screaming in a way no mother forgets, and one adult couldn’t breathe.

I looked around at the people I loved most. Breathing, crying, bleeding. Alive. Then I realized—the dog was gone. The door had bent into a concave shape, and she had bolted through the gap into the pouring rain.

We waited in that storm, water running down my face, mixing with blood from a scalp wound. I lay collapsed on the ground in shock, waiting for three ambulances that couldn’t seem to find us.

Later, I learned my son—my Boy Scout—had flagged down strangers and moved from one injured family member to another, quietly triaging like someone who truly lived the motto “always prepared.” He told me later, “If there was ever a time to panic, it was then… so why didn’t I panic?” Maybe it was Scouts. Or maybe it was grace.

My other sons were searching for our doggie and car top carrier stuffings.

For me, a peace came. I thought: don’t make this worse by catastrophizing. Just lay still and pray.

It was more than an hour before first responders found us. When they did, volunteers stayed with my uninjured kids, even drove them to the hospital, and later handed us bags of clean clothes because ours were soaked—or cut away in the back of the ambulance. They weren’t just rescuers—they were kindness personified. As if God Himself had walked the mud.

I remember the staples most clearly. Lying on that hospital bed, my hair matted with mud and grass, my scalp split open, I wanted to show my boys how strong their mom was. “I’ve survived a laceration, staples are nothing,” I told myself. And I laid still, mocking the sting, my sons’ eyes wide in disbelief as the doctor clicked one metal clamp after another into my skin.

But that moment of defiant pride dissolved when I heard my daughter’s primal scream down the hall. Her femur was shattered, her lumbar fractured—the kind of injuries that change everything. She would need a titanium plate. We were transferred to a larger hospital.

Stay tuned for Part Two...