Abigail (Abby) Marsh

Thank you for having me.

Yes, it's an incredibly busy freeway, very heavily trafficked.

I was coming into Tacoma on I-5 South from Seattle when the freeway rises up over an overpass.

And so there are no shoulders whatsoever.

And yet somehow a dog had made it onto the freeway that night and it ran across the freeway right in front of my car.

And I did what I now know you should never do, which is I swerved to try to avoid it.

And unfortunately, I hit it anyways.

And the combination of hitting the dog and swerving sharply sent my car into a series of fishtails across several lanes of freeway.

It's a miracle I didn't hit anybody.

And then it ended up, as I tried to wrestle back control of the car, spinning in these huge donuts around and around until finally it came to a rest in the fast lane of the freeway facing backward.

into the oncoming traffic just past the crest of the overpass.

In the fast lane.

And the engine had died as a result of all of this spinning around.

And there's no shoulder because it's an overpass that didn't have an end.

So there was nowhere I could drive the car to or that I could jump out of the car and run to.

I was just stuck in this fast lane of the freeway with cars barely swerving in time to avoid me because they just...

you know, just caught sight of me as they were coming across the crest of the overpass.

And so my car would shake every time these big cars and semis would swerve around it at the last minute.

And I knew, I just knew it was a matter of time until one of them was going to hit me.

I did.