#3. And then I died ...

(the crash #1)

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My eyes opened slowly, awaking hazily from the depth of sleep. But once my senses came to me they opened wide, my heart stopped and time stood still.

It's difficult to describe a moment of absolute tranquility in absolute chaos but this is what I felt in the moments before the car I was travelling in at 120km/h flipped and rolled.

My first thought was 'damn it, I've dozed off." Which was quickly followed by, "Oh fuck, your not even on the road!"

I remembered in that moment an episode of Police Crash Investigations (an Australian T.V show investigating car crashes) that I had watched in which the investigators were trying to work out how a car had come off the road in a particular case. Their discovery was that another vehicle had pushed the car that crashed to the side of the side, which was dirt.

The driver of that vehicle swerved suddenly when they hit the dirt, trying to get back onto the pavement. This ultimately led to their downfall, as the quick shift in the surface traction caused the vehicle to swerve suddenly before fishtailing out of control. I won't mention the end result!

With this in mind I knew I had to very carefully steer myself back onto the pavement if I was to avoid an accident, as any sudden, and instinctual, jerks would ruin me.

I leaned into the sheering wheel slowly when ahead of me I noticed a culvert rapidly coming toward me. A culvert is essentially a ditch which waters traverses, in this particular case underneath the highway. The effect to the side of the road was a meter deep hole right in the path I was traveling.

Despite taking my foot off the accelerator and lightly touching the brake, I knew I was going to hit it no matter what I did, I was going too fast to stop or to avoid what was coming. Destiny, it seemed, was calling me to it.

So that was it. That all happened in less than a second, at which point I made a determination that I was, in actual fact ... completely fucked.

With an odd sense of calm I closed my eyes, let go of the wheel and prepared to meet my end.

What followed haunted me thereafter.

I don't know how many times the car rolled, at one stage I remember I was actually trying to count them. Thinking it rather silly at the time I stopped halfway through at about five and tried to block out the nightmare was happening, praying to whatever was out there to take me kindly.

The car came to a stop and everything went black.