Two years ago today a farm trailer almost killed me on a back road. Still processing it.
I don't really know why I'm posting this today except that anniversaries do something weird to your brain and I needed to put it somewhere.
Two years ago tonight I was driving home from my cousin's going-away party, completely sober, good mood, nothing unusual. It was a rural two-lane road I'd driven probably a thousand times. Cloudy, no moon.
Out of nowhere — and I mean nowhere — there's this massive flatbed trailer parked halfway into my lane. No reflectors I could see, no hazard lights, nothing. I was doing the speed limit. By the time my headlights actually caught it I had maybe a second, maybe less. I yanked the wheel, clipped the rear corner of the trailer, and my car went sideways into the drainage ditch along the road.
I remember the airbag. I remember silence. I remember unbuckling myself and just... sitting there in the tilted car trying to figure out if I was dead.
I wasn't dead. Fractured two ribs, tore something in my shoulder, and had a concussion that made the next three weeks genuinely miserable. The shoulder took almost eight months of PT before I felt close to normal, and honestly some mornings it still reminds me.
The trailer belonged to a farm operation and had apparently been left there while somebody went to get a different vehicle. No ticket was ever issued that I know of. That part still makes me angry.
Insurance stuff dragged on for over a year. I felt like I was constantly fighting to be believed.
Anyone else get hit by something that shouldn't have been there? How did you handle the liability side when it wasn't another driver?