https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/drink-driver-paralysed-waist-down-22899753?utm_source=mirror_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=EM_Mirror_Nletter_DailyNews_News_smallteaser_Image_Story7&utm_campaign=daily_newsletter&ccid=2369561Drink-driver, 18, paralysed from waist down after being thrown 75ft from truck crash
Melissa Ann has given a warning to other drink drivers after she made the fatal decision to drive home after playing beer pong at a house party
By Grace Witherden
16:23, 24 OCT 2020Updated16:24, 24 OCT 2020
A woman who became paralysed after she was thrown 75ft in the air through a truck window after playing beer pong has given a chilling warning to drink drivers. When Melissa Ann was 18 she necked about five drinks at a house party and made the fatal decision to drive home. She jumped behind the wheel of her pickup truck with her friend and began driving to her home in Tallahassee in Florida, US. Melissa pulled up beside a car on a merging lane and had to suddenly slam on the breaks after she was cut off “at the last secondâ€Â. The teen wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and was thrown 75ft into the air. Horrified locals discovered Melissa face down with her neck twisted. She broke her neck in five places, damaged her spinal cord and was left paralysed from the neck down. Her friend escaped with a broken pelvis and tail bone. Now Melissa, 30, has urged others not to make the same mistake as her and speaks to other drunk drivers about her experience. She told the Real Fix podcast: "Once my truck started flipping after getting caught on the shoulder of the road, neither one of us had put on our seatbelts for whatever crazy reason and we flipped about eight to ten times. And during the course of that flipping I got thrown out of my truck I landed 75ft away from my friend and it looks like I came out of the vehicle first based on where we landed, and then she landed further, right next to where the vehicle had stopped flipping. So the guys that had ended up finding us, they said that if it had ended up flipping one more time, it would have ended up completely crushing her."
She added: "One of the guys who was next to me, he did say to me that I squeezed his hand a couple of times, and that's how he knew that I was OK. And who would have ever, ever known that even after the crash and the injury that that man's hand would be the last hand that I would ever squeeze again."
After she was found Melissa was put in a coma and on a ventilator for 10 days before she was transferred to a rehabilitation centre in Atlanta, Georgia. She spent two months in hospital where she regained movement but not feeling. She still has no feeling below the neck but has regained some movement in her arms, thanks to tireless rehab work. She now uses an electric wheelchair to get around and has written a book Hope, Love, and Me: My Journey of Choices and Second Chances about her experience. She added: "Would I want my feeling and movement back like used to have? Of course that would be crazy to say that I want to be paralysed."
She continued: "But at the end of the day, if that would mean that I was everything that I have learned before, and the heart for humanity that I have gained, even with all the physical losses, I wouldn't want to change it because I wouldn't want to know what sort of person that I maybe would have ended up becoming if I did stay stuck in that pattern of just simply living for myself."
Listen to the Real Fix podcast here
www.real-fix.com/real-fix-podcast
