I wasn't driving (I don't drive, too afraid now) but I was a passenger. I was 14.
I'd been sleeping in the car. The driver wasn't paying attention and cut the corner when he was speeding. He was going 90km/h around a blind corner on a gravel road out in the county.
I woke up to the sound of my mum screaming. A dark shape appeared in front of us. We all went flying forwards in our seats. This all happened in slow motion, it was bizarre. The sound of metal crunching, fusing, snapping, glass shattering, all at once was defending. We crashed head on into a truck. The entire front of the car was just gone, crushed, fused with this other vehicle. The windshield actually was half gone, just turned to dust. I just remember stumbling out onto the road as soon as I could get out. The impact had been so strong that my clothes actually caused cuts and grazes all down my stomach and around my hips. My mum was trapped inside and I couldn't open her door. She was just sitting in there, looking at me, screaming to help my brother. Then I saw finally him. He'd been sitting beside me but he only had a lap belt. He'd slid down and was half on the floor, half on the seat. It looked like his back was broken. His face was covered in blood. There was blood everywhere.. He was making this horrible, horrible muffled/frantic moaning sound that I'll never ever forget. I undid his seat belt and with the help of some people we got him onto the road. My mum had somehow escaped the car. As he was lying on the road I could finally see his injuries. Half his face was just completely shattered. My bro. My best friend, best brother, favorite sibling, the guy who raised me better than my own farther. Slipping away before my eyes. I ran to get my phone to call for help. We were hours away from anywhere.
Then I saw something that really scared the shit out of me more than anything that day: there was no reception. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. My bro was gonna die and no one was gonna get there in time to help. Apart from the car we crashed into I hadn't seen any other vehicles on the road. How long until someone helped us? An hour? Five hours? A day?
By some fucking insane miracle the guy we crashed into (who was mostly unharmed) was being followed by a car full of his friends who lived in a farmhouse 5 minutes away. They pulled up to the crash scene and didn't waste time. Three got out to help us, two drove back to the house to call for help. Their help saved my brothers life. It was 45 minutes until we saw flashing lights, closely followed by a rescue chopper. Those were the longest 45 minutes of my life. I don't remember what I did exactly but I remember it felt like forever. I just walked off about 10 steps and fell to my knees. There wasn't anything more I could do to help so I finally let go. I didn't cry. Just prayed. I wasn't religious but what else do you do in that situation? I just prayed my bro would make it.
They treated me and my bro first. I just remember lying in the back of the ambulance while they worked on him, thinking about those adds on TV that discourage carless driving. Back then they never showed what it was really like. Experiencing the real thing was not what I expected it to be. It was so painful and shocking and physically jarring. My thoughts were interrupted by hearing the sound of my brother vomiting and the paramedics started to get very concerned. Which isn't something you typically see from a paramedic. I just heard "he's throwing up blood" and then I really went into shock. I couldn't hear anything, just remember watching the blades on the chopper outside start spinning. It was right there, right in front of me and I couldn't hear it. If you've ever been around a running helicopter, it's deafening.
They lost him a couple of times in the chopper on the way to the hospital. He went straight into surgery. He was in surgery all night. Parts of his brain had died and had to be removed to make room for the swelling. When you have a traumatic brain injury the brain swells, but if there's nowhere for it to expand it kind of implodes into itself and dies. So they had to take off the front of his skull for a week while the swelling was happening. Medical science is amazing. He later had a 14 hour surgery to reconstruct the entire half of his face. They literally had to rebuild his eye socket because it was just gone. It was really touch and go for a while.
It took him months but he made a recovery. Not a full recovery, but if you met him now you wouldn't know he had brain damage unless you really knew what to look for. Being his sister I can definitely see the difference though.
Never ever drive carelessly. Just don't get in the habit. Don't get a car with a lap belt in the middle back seat. If you do ever have to take a passenger in the lap belt seat, drive extra carefully. My brother was injured because he only had the lap belt, and when we crashed, he hit his head on the center console. The reason no one else was badly hurt was because we all had proper seat belts.