Getting hit by a truck is the least of my worries

Hi, my name is Katie McMillan and I was hit by a truck.

September 2nd was my grandfather's 90th birthday. I flew all the way from Seattle to South Carolina to surprise him. Unfortunately, we would not get to do much celebrating. I was driving my mother's car back from picking up his birthday dinner in town when I was in a head-on collision. On a particularly twisty, back country road, a man driving opposite me (allegedly) dropped something on the floor of his pickup truck and (allegedly) bent down to pick it up, causing him to (allegedly) swerve into my lane and slam into me full speed.

The front end of the car was crushed and the whole vehicle flew backward into a ditch off the road. The seat belt locked and airbags deployed. I was dazed and tried to get out of the car, when I realized--I couldn't move my legs. I was dizzy and crying as people who stopped to help dialed 911 and tried to see if I was okay. Paramedics and the fire department arrived. They were able to pull me out of the now-totaled car and I was taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital.

I am very lucky. Despite the severity of the accident, every test and scan would show that I was mostly clear of any significant damage--except for my right leg. My femur was broken, while the bottom half of my leg was crushed into what's called a pilon fracture--where the talus (ankle bone) is driven into the leg with such force that the tibia and fibula bones break at the ankle joint. It would take the orthopedic surgeon 11 hours to put me back together again. And another six days of recuperation in the hospital before I was released.

Unfortunately, that was the easy part.

As it stands (hah), I am currently wheelchair bound. I am now in South Carolina indefinitely--away from my home, my fiance, and our fur babies--until I am healed enough to walk again (or, at least, to hobble up the stairs to our second floor apartment). I am looking down the barrel of not only enormous medical emergency bills, but also months of follow-up doctors visits and physical therapy.

Either way, I live in America and do not have health insurance. Better still, I need to find a new job that can accommodate my current limitations. There may be an insurance settlement sometime in my future, but in my present reality--I need help. No insurance company cares about whether or not the rent gets paid while they argue over how much my bodily damage was worth.

So, anything raised here will go to all the things that can't wait: rent, bills, prescriptions by the handful, first aid, walkers, wheelchairs, etc etc etc.

Getting hit by a truck really sucks.

Thank you for thinking of me.