Sue Tootill

It was a crisp, sunny but cold Monday morning in January 2000. A car came careering around the corner on my side of the lane, it was like slow motion. I had nowhere to go. It was a head-on crash with an estimated 80mph impact.

I couldn’t breathe or move, and it took the fire crew almost two hours to cut me out of the wreckage.

I was very aware of everything happening around me, but I thought I might be either dreaming, or in a film.

I remember thinking, “How can this be happening? I was just going about my normal, everyday life.”

The 17-year-old driver of the other car, fortunately, survived too. She had passed her driving test only five days prior.

I saw the young girl driver slumped at the side of the road (she managed to climb out of her window). She looked so childlike and vulnerable, but she was screaming.

She could easily have been my daughter.

Denied terror and fear manifested themselves in the June of that year, when I came to believe I had cheated death and in fact should have died.

I had felt supremely serene at the site but was then given the drug Ketamine, on removal from the crash (an anaesthetic drug but also a huge hallucinogenic).

I could no longer function and was mentally ill with anxiety and depression, which I had never previously suffered.

The blackness of the depression was hard, as I was devoid of any joy. A consultant psychiatrist believed I had suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and it is true to say that there was not a day that I did not relive some parts of the crash.

Sometimes I feel a bit of a fraud, as I survived my crash whilst others involved in RoadPeace live with the constant loss of their loved ones.