‘There’s nothing that can explain me being alive’: Mass. native miraculously survives N.C. car crash
Judy Dolan was submerged underwater for eight minutes before police broke through her car's back window.
Just over a week ago, Judy Dolan was only two minutes away from home after dropping her daughter Kiara off at work in North Carolina when she lost consciousness. Her car flipped over the road barrier and dropped 20 feet into the center of a creek, landing submerged and upside down. It quickly filled with dark murky water, leaving everything pitch black and silent. Dolan, a Norwell hairdresser and Duxbury native, closed her mouth and unbuckled her seatbelt slowly, trying to feel for the door. But as she moved out of the driver’s side she became tangled up in the passenger seat seatbelt. Eight minutes later, police broke through her back windshield, expecting to find a corpse. Instead, when the glass shattered, they were left in disbelief. “I remember a light above me just as I was starting to die,” she told Boston.com last week. “I could see the sky and the bridge.”While trapped underwater, all she could imagine was a police officer walking up to her home, her son opening the door, and the officer telling him his mother had drowned after being trapped in her car. She thought of her four kids, her sister, and her nephew’s faces as they processed that news. “I just couldn’t imagine them living knowing their mother drowned in her own car just feet from her house,” Dolan said, crying as she spoke. “Like, what would they do with that information?” She said when you’re underwater, you don’t care about anything other than seeing your loved ones again.Police said Dolan scrambled out of the car so quickly, crying and gasping for air, then clawing her way up a steep hill toward an ambulance, that at first they couldn’t remember what her face looked like.They said it shouldn’t have been humanly possible for her to be alive after spending eight minutes under the creek’s surface. Dolan only had two bruises on her back and a tiny scratch on her finger. After the near-death experience, she said she’ll never be the same again. Over the next few days she went to see the police officers who saved her, hearing their accounts and watching a video of what the rescue effort looked like from their perspectives. “It was just a miracle,” she said. “I’m so grateful just to talk.”Now she sits outside listening to the birds and feeling the breeze on her skin.“People think, ‘Oh, we have all the time in the world,’” she said, but then they spend it worrying about planning a trip or paying bills.“Your trip and vacation is just waking up every morning and being alive,” she said.
‘The world is just a little different now’
Just before the crash, Dolan said she had felt faint.“I just felt like I’d lost a piece of time,” she said.So she pulled over and waited a bit, not realizing a police officer had pulled over, too, waiting behind her in case something was wrong. Being so close to home, she figured she would finish the drive. But if that officer hadn’t stopped, she likely wouldn’t be alive today.When she went back to the scene of the crash days later, she said it was surreal to stare into the water and see her reflection mixing with the remnants of things she’d left behind.“I’m just picking up pennies and pieces of makeup,” Dolan said. She thought of all the passersby who would look in and see the debris as random trash.“The world is just a little different now,” she said. Her first night in the hospital, Dolan said she hardly slept because she was afraid she’d close her eyes and dream of the water.“I was so worried I would end up back in that car,” she said. “I’m kind of between two worlds in my mind,” Dolan said. “I feel so fragile.” She said it worries her four kids — she has two daughters in their 20s and two 17-year-old identical twin sons. They keep saying they want things to go back to normal. But “I sound different, I feel different,” Dolan said. She said she hugs her kids differently and holds conversations with others differently now, too.
‘I fought so hard to be here’
While she hardly has money to cover expenses leftover from the crash, she said money is the last thing on her mind. On March 9, Dolan’s boss from the Rebel Hair Studio organized a GoFundMe campaign, raising money to replace Dolan’s car, pay for her towing fees — which alone were $4,000, she said — and restore her hair cutting equipment. “I have worked with Judy for 9 years now and she is one of the most caring, HARD working, and giving individuals I have ever met,” Michelle Boeger, Dolan’s boss, wrote on the GoFundMe page. “The car that was totaled in the accident only had liability insurance,” Boeger said. “She had only had the car for six weeks.”As of Monday, $4,685 of an $8,000 goal had been donated.Dolan, who grew up in Duxbury, works full time and commutes between Angier, N.C. and Massachusetts every few weeks for family. Since the accident she’s received so many texts and calls from high school friends and people she doesn’t even know. She said it felt like glimpsing the memorial speeches people might have given had she died. “I fought so hard to be here,” she said. “It’s like a living funeral.”Dolan said the overwhelming love is the best feeling in the world. As she was slowly adjusting back to a normal rhythm, Dolan said she’s been tossed between talking normally and crying uncontrollably. “There’s nothing that can explain me being alive,” she said.And all she wants to do is tell people how grateful she is. “I feel like the luckiest person alive on one hand,” Dolan said, “And on the other, I still feel trapped.”
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