On February 18, 2006, I jumped into my Dodge Neon and headed to work at Greenbo Lake State Resort Park in Greenup County. Like most state parks in Kentucky, it is located in a rural area. It was about ten degrees that morning and snowing. I knew that the roads could be treacherous, but I had to report to my job. I had just come off maternity leave and did not want to miss any more work. My husband offered to let me drive his truck but I declined, pointing out that the snow wasn’t even sticking to the road.

I wasn’t too uneasy even though I had to travel Route 1 which corkscrews along the Little Sandy River, and I know that stretch of road can get slick. Still, I didn’t think the road was too bad until I came around a curve near Claylick Road. Suddenly I felt the rear end of my car start to slide. I tried to steer but found that I had no control. The next thing I knew I was in the Little Sandy River and my car was filling up with water!

I am normally not a calm person, but at that moment all I could think about was my four month old son, Wyatt, and what would happen to him without me. I was determined he would not have to find out. I had had a high risk pregnancy in which there had always been the threat of losing him. I had lost a child the year before, so having Wyatt was a miracle in itself. I kept thinking that I did not go through all that effort to leave him now. I prayed and God helped me to stay calm and let me know what I had to do in order to get back to my beautiful little boy.

I jerked my seat belt off and began to roll the window down. Everything seemed to move in slow motion, except the icy water which came rushing into my car. I could not get out the side window. My car was nose down so that the rear of the car was still in the air. I crawled over the front seat and began rolling down the back window; then I looked up and realized that the rear glass had been broken out during the crash. I reached through the opening, grabbed the spoiler on the trunk, and hoisted myself out of the car. I suddenly felt a sense of relief because I knew I was not going to drown in the car.

I was now in the bone-chilling river. Disoriented, I had no idea in which direction the road lay but I knew no one else had seen the accident. It was up to me to save myself. I was treading water and soon I saw cars going by above me, so I began to swim towards them. Since it was February, I was wearing a heavy sweater and shoes which made swimming difficult. I knew I had to keep my head above water, so I turned over on my back and swam to the bank. By the time I reached land, my car was submerged beneath the murky water.

I was familiar with this part of the river and realized that my car had plunged down a 15 to 20 foot embankment which I now had to climb. At this point I realized that my right arm was probably broken (I later learned that it was my wrist). I tried to climb up the steep hill, but it was muddy and every tree sapling I grabbed pulled up out of the ground. I could use only my left hand to pull with since my right arm was hurting and I could not use it to grip. I slid down three times before I made it to the top.

“I did not make it out of the car, then out of the river, just to freeze on the bank!” I kept telling myself.

I was thrilled when I reached the roadway but instantly dismayed since no one was around. I started to walk and had gone only about twenty feet when two middle-aged men came by in a truck. They were going fishing, they told me. I had no idea what they were doing fishing on a snowy Saturday morning, but I was thankful they were. They told me to get into their truck and sit down. I refused, not wanting to get their seat wet. I slumped down onto the ground while we assessed our options. Then an older woman came by. She immediately left to call for an ambulance because there was no cell phone service in that particular area. Another man came along and hurried back to his house to get blankets to wrap around me. The two fishermen asked me where my car was. I pointed over the hill. They said they couldn’t see it.

“It sank already,” I told them. They stood there in the snow with a flabbergasted look on their faces.

Those are the facts; these are the miracles: I was driving a small car which any impact should have destroyed. I went between two forks in a tree, only scraping the bark off the tree in a 5-inch section, without breaking any of the branches. I sailed over a 15 to 20 foot embankment and yet my airbags did not deploy. That was good because they probably would have knocked me out and I would have drowned.

I escaped a sinking car, swam an icy river, climbed a slippery slope to the highway and was found shortly thereafter. There is no doubt in my mind that it was my guardian angels who squeezed me between the forks in the tree, sat my car down gently in the river, pulled me out of the car, across the river, and up the bank where they knew I would be rescued. They knew that no one...