The clock on my dashboard glowed a few minutes past 2:00am. It was my green tea, the streetlamps and me – I could have sworn I had the road to myself. I glanced slightly to my left, thinking about how nice it was going to be to crawl into my bed. My line of sight focused on the red light, in anticipation of the switch to green, when my entire body was thrown forward into my steering wheel. It felt like my lungs jumped out of my throat, but my shock forced scream after scream out of my mouth. There was blood and tea splattered all over my white dress, and it was all I could do to pick up my phone and call someone.
This is the story of how I was hit by a drunk driver. You always hear the numbers, but they never carry any weight until you’re looking into the absent eyes of the man who just smashed into your car. MADD Canada (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) estimated that in 2010, there were approximately 3 to 4 impairment-related crash deaths per day. Roughly 175 individuals were injured in impairment-related crashes per day, in the same year.
I thought I had the road to myself because the drunken man who came up from behind me failed to turn his lights on. He was so intoxicated that he failed to see both the red light, and my massive SUV sitting patiently up above in the same lane as him. He was doing over 100km per hour, and he hit me with such a force that my car was pushed 90 feet forward to the other side of the intersection.
I can almost guarantee that you have been touched by a news story involving impaired driving within the last 7 days. The 3 siblings and their grandfather all killed at once by a drunk driver in Vaughan, Ontario. The woman in Lakeland, Florida, who used the video-streaming application Periscope to announce to her viewers that she, was driving drunk. “Let’s see if I can make it all the way home people, without a ticket,” she was quoted. She was more concentrated on eluding the authorities than she was on avoiding the grave danger she had created for herself and everyone around her. The absolute worst part about all of these tragedies is that they were entirely avoidable.
I was sitting on the side of the road, asking an incredibly kind bystander if my nose was still where it was supposed to be. My entire face had gone numb, and it took all of my muscles to keep from shaking. The driver walked towards me but stopped 4 or 5 feet from where I sat, and angled his body away from my car to look at me sheepishly. “I’m sorry, miss,” was all he said. I maintain that had I not been in such a deep shock, I would’ve punched him in his face. He was so drunk that when his car hit mine, he avoided all immediate injury because none of his muscles tensed.
The cherry on top of it all? This particular impaired driver had a pending charge. For what? A DUI (Driving Under the Influence). A question I often ask myself is, why did it have to get this far? Why did this man have to endanger the lives of several innocent people, and almost kill someone, for the law to act?
I was lucky; I only sustained a concussion and some black eyes. You will hear this story, and you will hear a million more, but many won’t end that easily. There will never be a time when people don’t drive while under the influence, and that’s why it’s so important to talk about all of the ways it can be avoided. We need proactive laws, not reactive ones. The mother who lost all of her babies in a split second – she thinks so. Statistics have desensitized us to the epidemic that is impaired driving – numbers are just numbers; they aren’t the faces of the 9-year-old, 5-year-old and 2-year-old who lost their lives on the side of a road.
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