The sun shone brightly, and the weather was unseasonably warm for March as I drove home from a routine doctor’s visit in the cities. I had just merged onto the highway about a mile or so back and was moving along in the right-hand lane at the posted speed.

With at least a half-hour drive ahead of me, I picked up my Rosary from the center console, made the Sign of the Cross, and began to pray. All was well. Then, only a few seconds later, I felt a violent bump on the driver’s side of my 2001 Pontiac Sunfire.

What on earth was that? I wondered as I fought the steering wheel with all my strength to keep from careening off the road. Then a second bump came, much more violent than the first.

Glancing back over my left shoulder, I came to the terrifying realization that a semi-truck attempting to pass me in the left-hand lane was merging right on top of me.

My car started pulling around toward the trailer. I frantically grabbed at the steering wheel, but the continuous impacts from my car bouncing along the side of the semi kept ripping it out of my hands. Then a pair of rear truck tires hit me, ripping open my driver’s side door and folding the door forward against the hood of my car. One of the trailer’s enormous, black wheels spun mere inches from my body, grinding away at the frame of my vehicle. The sound was like being run over by a freight train, and the pungent odors of melting rubber and burning metal filled my nostrils. All of the objects in my car flew about as if caught in a tornado.

Finally, my car dislodged from the rear truck wheels and spun out several times. Then, as quickly as it had begun, I came to a sudden stop, surrounded on all sides by dead, brown grass. Everything was quiet. I glanced about, unbuckled my seat belt, and climbed out of the wreck. I walked away dazed but with hardly a scratch on my body.

While I was still at the scene, waiting for an ambulance to arrive, the responding police officer went over to my car to find my insurance papers. She came back and handed me my Rosary, which she had found in a pile of glass on the driver’s seat. “Someone was looking out for you,” she said.

I couldn’t agree more.