Car troubles.

This week I learned something new:

Wednesday morning I was driving up with Haley and Jane to get our patient information for clinical. Everything was going smoothly. The traffic had been kind of bad, but it had thinned out. We were almost there and by all appearances I would definitely be able to make it back to Provo for my 11 o'clock class.

Suddenly, just as we were about to get off of I-215, there was a loud bang/pop/explosion noise. My immediate thought was that we had just run over something big and it had damaged the car. But I was being careful and I hadn't seen anything! Smoke billowed up in front of the car and Haley exclaimed "I think we blew a tire." I put on my blinker and pulled over to the side of the free way. It all happened so very fast. We jumped out of the car only to find that all the tires were fine and the smoke was pouring out from under the hood. I was pretty scared. Having heard so many awful, real stories about people being hit on the freeway at clinical, all of us were really nervous to be standing there. I realized my phone was in the car and opened the door to get it. It finally registered that I should probably turn the car off. I did and then got out as quickly as possible. I'm not gonna lie, we were all a little nervous that something was going to explode...

I immediately called my Dad and Jane called her brother who is a mechanic and lives really close. I finally got brave enough to look under the hood and tried to describe to Dad what I saw. It was very apparent that I couldn't be more unfamiliar with a car engine. All three of us were clueless. We could see some wet, dirty fluid everywhere and that's about all we could figure out.

I'm sure we were a rather interesting site-three girls in professional dress, two on the phone, looking under the hood. We were actually all surprised that no one stopped to help what were obviously DIDs (damsels in distress-for those of you who haven't seen Hercules ;).

It was cold, and smoke eventually stopped coming from the car, so we got back in and waited for my Mom to come pick us up. Jane's brother got there first and after examining the car he said that we had thrown a rod. And he showed me the hole in the engine. Which basically means, go buy a new engine.

We eventually got things figured out, got our stuff at the hospital, and got back to Prove. Just one car short.

I am so grateful nothing more serious happened and that we were all safe. It could have been so much worse. It was timed exactly right when there was room on the side of the freeway to pull over (there wasn't any until right then), we had so many people helping us, and we were all safe.

We're now out one car on the lookout for another. I learned that occasionally I don't freak out in a scary situation. And I learned what it means to 'throw a rod.'

That's all :)