'Cherish every moment' - After mother survives accident, family
learns true meaning of Thanksgiving
By DIONNE GLEATON, T&D Staff WriterThursday, November 22, 2007
Bridgette, Joseph, Justin, Brandon and DaShaun have a reason to be thankful this holiday season.
While a couple of the children may be too young to fully understand what Mommy went through, the eldest, 10-year-old Bridgette, is fully aware that they could have lost her forever in a bloody, near-fatal car crash.
"There she is!" they shouted as 25-year-old Amanda Williams was escorted into her mother's mobile home by her fiance, Shaun Brown. A neck brace, indwelling IV in her left arm and scrapes on her slow-moving feet were signs of the accident which kept Williams at the Medical University of South Carolina since Oct. 27.
She was driving back to Orangeburg from Walterboro along Interstate 95 after visiting her aunt. It was a foggy day when she blacked out and hit a guard rail. Her small, green Chevrolet began flipping across the road. She was ejected from the vehicle and run over by a pickup truck while she was lying in the road.
Her attempts to cross to the other side of the road were crushed along with her left arm. She was left in the road with excruciating pain from several other serious injuries, including a partially collapsed lung and a broken C1 vertebra, which formed the joint connecting her skull and spine.
Six surgeries later, she is now back at home, fully aware that it will be a year before she is able to work again.
"I can not use my arm. I had to have numerous surgeries on it. I ended up with a metal plate in both of my shoulder areas. I had to have skin grafted off my leg and put onto my arm so that it wouldn't get infected," Williams said.
While the accident has broken her body, it has not shattered an attitude of gratitude which beamed forth as she met her young children at the door of her mother's home last weekend.
Bridgette, 8-year-old twins Joseph and Justin, 4-year-old Brandon and bubbly 17-month-old DaShaun are her reason for living and why she is exceptionally thankful this Thanksgiving Day for life.
"I'm thankful to be alive for my kids. My oldest daughter came up the day it happened. She wouldn't hold my hand, and she wouldn't sit beside me. Nothing broke my heart more than to see her pull away from me," said Williams, who was given four pints of blood to help replace all that she lost in the horrible crash.
Physical and occupational therapy are helping her regain mobility in the right arm she relies on to write and change diapers, but Williams said she is just grateful that she wasn't paralyzed or killed.
"Live life to the fullest because you never know when it's over. It's not guaranteed. I thank God I'm alive and have a little bit more time to spend with my kids. There's no bigger blessing," Williams said.
Brown, who stayed with Williams nearly the entire time she was hospitalized, said his nervousness upon learning of Williams' accident rendered him unable to even think.
"I just wanted to get down there and be with her to see if she was all right. I had a lot of tragedies going on with my family, so the first thing I did was just start praying. God wasn't going to put more on me than I could bear," said Brown, who was one of the first to see Williams after the accident.
"She was covered in blood. I'm real thankful that I didn't lose somebody I love a lot. I've got more to be thankful for this year. I've still got my family together, and that's a blessing. Amanda helped me through a lot of hard times. Whenever I've got things going on, she's always a shoulder I can lean on. She's my backbone," Brown said.
While Joseph and Justin said Mommy "helps us and looks out for us," Bridgette felt much the same way. She was glad to have Mommy back at home with her and her brothers after such "a hard time."
"We go to school together, and we look out for each other and my mommy. I love my mommy," Bridgette said.
William's mother, Eula Rushton, was also thankful to have her daughter alive and well.
"I know God was with her when it happened. When I first went in ... the room where she was at, the only thing I could see was just her hands and her feet. They were bloody. I looked at the nurse and told her, 'That's not my daughter.' When I walked up to the bed, everything just went blank. She was bloody from head to toe," Rushton said.
"I didn't think she was living. The only thing that let me know she was was ... a little grunt she did," she said.
Williams has two sisters, Joanne, 26, and Michelle, 23. Michelle is now caring for her niece and nephews while Williams recuperates.
Like her mother, Joanne said she also knew it was God who saved her sister from paralysis or death.
"She asked me a couple of days before she had come home, 'How am I still alive?' I'm like, 'Girl, you had angels wrapped around you.' God was with her the whole entire time. He was right there with her," said Joanne, an emergency department technician at The Regional Medical Center in Orangeburg.
"I didn't see Amanda until after surgery, and that was enough. I mean, I work in the ER and see this kind of stuff all the time, but I don't know if I would have been able to handle seeing her like that. Even when she came out of surgery, it was horrible," said Joanne, noting that the holiday will be exceptionally special this year.
"We never thought for one second that she'd be home for Thanksgiving. To have her home is a blessing. I'm happy to have her home and that she's alive and not paralyzed. There's just so much to be thankful for in this situation," Joanne said.
Brown, who had a firm grip on his future wife's hand, agreed.
"Cherish every moment you have with someone because you never know when it may be your last time with them," he said.
Rushton can be reached by phone at 803-378-1728 or at 1438 Pepper Lane, Orangeburg, S.C. 29115.
T&D Staff Writer Dionne Gleaton can be reached by e-mail at dgleaton@timesanddemocrat.com or by phone at 803-533-5534. Discuss this and other stories online at TheTandD.com.
