Lindsay Thomas: Trapped in a car wreck for five days

Lindsay Thomas awoke with a start. "I was confused," she remembers, "like in a dream when you're not sure where you are." On the night of April 25, 2001, Thomas, then 18, had dozed off while driving from her bartending job in West Des Moines to a second job in Waverly, Iowa. Her 1989 Ford Escort slammed into a concrete culvert beneath Interstate 35. She was calf-deep in water, her legs pinned beneath the crushed dashboard. Her jaw, right wrist and several ribs were shattered.

Thomas remained trapped for five days, praying, napping and sipping water from a bottle cap she found in the car. "I wasn't in much pain," she says. "But the fifth day it began to rain, and I felt cold and weak. I didn't know if I would make it. I gave up yelling because nobody could see or hear me."

Then two road workers saw tire tracks and decided to investigate. "One stepped onto my hood and yelled, 'Is somebody there?'" Thomas recalls. "He about fell off when I answered." She was airlifted to University hospital in Iowa City, where her parents, Dean and Jean, both 55, and sister Laura, 16, rushed to her side. Doctors told them that gangrene had set in and to save her life they would have to amputate Lindsay's lower legs. A cross-country runner and cyclist, she answered stoically, "I know." Her father, she adds, "just started crying."

Tears have given way to pride. "She has showed me what real strength is," says Dean. Today, at 19, Lindsay, who lives in Tracy, Calif., says she hopes to attend college and eventually design prosthetics. "I survived one goal at a time -- first to heal, then to help others."