Tammy Harvison

The Effects of Distracted Driving

One Fall morning, cool crisp air with a strong ray of Sunshine was how the day started on Nov. 1, 2016. My Daughter, Brittany texted me around 7:30 a.m. that morning and we texted a few minutes and I texted I love you, not knowing it would be the last time. Today would turn out to be a day that would forever change my life and my family's. My mother was in the hospital fighting Lung Cancer for the second time. She had been an 8 year Cancer Survivor until she got the news that it had come back. I was on my way back from the hospital to go pick up a few things that my mother had asked me to go pick up at her house. On my way there, my cell phone rang and it was Anita, telling me that my Daughter, Brittany had been hit by a car (8:29 a.m) and that things didn't look good and to get to the hospital. I couldn't believe what I just heard, I did a complete circle in the middle of the road to turn around and head back to the same very hospital I had just left from. Upon arriving at the hospital, I did not know what I was walking into, except that I knew things were bad. I was then approached by Brittany's Dad, and the doctor's and we went into a room and that's when the Doctor said that they were giving her brain surgery to help stop the bleeding and excessive swelling in the brain. It was a couple of hours later that the doctor came back and said that she had broken her brain stem and that she probably wouldn't make it 48 hours. The police, who was two cars back and caught the entire accident on dashcam, told us that she was hit by a driver that said he didn't see her crossing the street and that she went face-first into the windshield and flew up into the air, then onto the pavement. My daughter suffered several bleeds in her brain and they were trying to stop it with tubes by draining it, she had excessive swelling, and the top of her brain stem was severed. When the doctors gave her an MRI to see the damage, it revealed that because of the extensive injury that the bleeding and swelling had killed a lot of her brain tissue, which once dead, can't be reversed. When you suffer a Traumatic Brain Injury to this magnitude, it is nearly impossible to have a normal functioning life. As my daughter lay in a bed, on life support in the ICU for nine days fighting for her life, the doctors said that we needed to make a decision to take her off life support or let her live on machines for the rest of her life. I was devastated and going through so many emotions I had never been through before, that I didn't want to lose her, I just wanted a miracle to heal her. We ultimately decided to take her off life support and let her go because she was not ever going to have a functional life again and would only survive on machines and we couldn't do that to her, so on the afternoon of Nov. 9, 2016, we took her off the machines, while holding her hand as she passed away. This was a needless tragedy that shouldn't have happened and that took a life away that should be here today. My daughter, Brittany was 23 years old when she got hit, a law student in College, and a vibrant young woman with many goals and dreams. Her life was cut short by someone that made a careless decision to drive distracted and not pay attention to pedestrians. Our family knows the worst now that can come out of Distracted Driving, SO PLEASE, DON"T DRIVE DISTRACTED!!!