STORYTIME: A LORRY CRASHED INTO US

I wanted to feature more personal and 'life stories' on Babies and Beauty, because essentially this little space is a huge part of my life, so it makes complete sense. What better way to start than telling you something pretty scary that happened to us almost three years ago now. I feel like I can talk about it more openly now, but at the time and for a good year or two afterwards it utterly terrified me, the constant re-running it through my head of what happened and what could of happened. It ultimately made me a really nervous driver, understandably I'm sure you'll agree? It's not everyday that you expect a forty four tonne vehicle to smash into the side of you on a motorway, though it's a thought that runs through my mind now every time I overtake one.

April 2015 saw my car in the garage, my trusty little tin car Peugeot 107 had lost it's power steering and whilst it was all well and good building up my muscles every time I needed to turn a corner, it had to be fixed. So in it went to the repair shop, and in return we were given a courtesy car. Which, may I add was definitely a con, it was an incredibly old Renault Clio, not like for like at all and in hindsight I think the garage pulled a swift one noticing I was a young girl and took the courtesy car themselves for a couple of weeks and shafted me off with either a) one of their cars or b) a spare they had lying around the garage. Let's just say karma dealt with that one, because the car was a complete write off. I was completely oblivious to all of that at the time and just relatively happy that the car we were given had 5 doors because trying to get a baby in and out of a 3 door car is no fun, let me tell you.

That weekend we had planned to visit my sister and brother-in-law up in Manchester, my hometown and where they live. John drove up and all was well and dandy, we had a lovely weekend, Sunday arrived and it was time to make tracks so we set back off on the 90 minute journey home. We'd not got too far, just past birch services if you're at all familiar with the M62 when ironically I took a picture on my phone making some joke about John driving. Eerie when you think about it. The M62 at this point had a 50mph zone that in the whole year it existed, I'd never seen anyone working on, but nonetheless it was there and thus we were at 50, maybe even just under at 47/48. As anyone will know, lorry drivers are usually the most experienced of us all, racking up hours every single day on the roads, this comes with it's faults / bonuses, it depends how you look at it, but they learn where the speed cameras are and are not. I can only presume that there wasn't any along this stretch of the motorway because low and behold in our wing mirror we could see a lorry moving into the middle lane to over take - which didn't matter to us, or so we thought. At that very moment in time I heard the loudest thunk I've ever heard, and it seemed as though the noise actually came before the lorry hit us which couldn't have possibly been the case but everything seemed to go suddenly into slow motion. Before I had time to register what the noise was, the lorry had clipped the back end of our car, he was moving into our lane completely unaware we were there. Within seconds we were horizontal across the front of the lorry being pushed up the M62. 

Everything that happened after that is a blur, I remember he stopped almost instantly, which I am thankful for because had that carried on for a second longer the car would have most definitely flipped and the consequences of that don't bare thinking about. We recently had a family friend involved in a serious accident with a lorry and she spent 3 long weeks in a coma - absolutely horrendous. While the lorry came to a standstill, the force of the push actually veered our car over to the hard shoulder and up against the barrier. It meant both me and Noah couldn't get out of our side of the car, I had to climb through Johns and then grab Noah out of his car seat that way. Pretty scary when you're on a motorway. The lorry driver moved his lorry further up the road and pulled over, immediately getting out to come and check on us admitting he simply 'forgot we were there'. I understand everyone makes mistakes and I was just truly grateful for his speedy reaction time, admission and that his tyres were in good quality meaning the lorry stopped instantly. Another car behind had seen the whole thing and stopped too, they let us know that they had foreseen what was about to happen and wanted to scream at him from their car. He had essentially pulled a pit maneuver on us. 

Thankfully none of us came out with a single scratch, Noah was merely awoken from his sleep but didn't shed a tear and generally had absolutely no idea what on earth was going on. We didn't suffer whiplash, and in a way I think I would have rather suffered a physical symptom like that, than the fear when I drive now because that's something I don't quite know how to overcome. I can do as much as I can to ensure we're safe on the road, make sure we have new tyres from tyreplus and that they're checked regularly, get our car serviced every year and drive as safe as possible. But I can't be accountable for other drives, and that is what terrifies me. The car was a complete write off, the drivers door (which took the main hit) was completely destroyed, we're lucky it didn't come off because John might not have escaped unharmed if it had of. The whole incident was pretty distressing, and not something that I'll forget in a hurry. If we've learnt anything from this it's just how important it is to drive safely. 

*This is a collaborative post