By Tiffany Allison
“You take things for granted in life,
you never know what’s going to happen tomorrow or the
next five minutes,” Kristina Sharp said.
Krystina Sharp is back
in school with determination to finish her education
only eight months after the life altering car accident.
Photo by
Mark Mitchell |
One late night in October taught Sharp to
not take life for granted. It was the night her life changed
forever.
Sharp was a victim of an automobile accident on Oct.
13, 2007. The driver, Matthew Taylor, 22, of Avery
County was alleged to be driving under the influence at
the time of the accident. The accident proved fatal for
her boyfriend, Justin Daniels. The other passengers were
in critical condition, but Sharp is the only one still suffering
from her injuries. She suffers from a brainstem injury.
Through this injury, she lost her ability to speak and she
also injured her left arm. She is currently going to physical
therapy to help straighten and rebuild the muscles and will
be through with therapy after the next few months.
“I was thrown out of the car,” Sharp said. “I
was in a coma for 18 days and only had a 10 percent chance
of waking up. The first memory I had was seeing Matt at
rehab.”
Sharp and Taylor have been friends for a while. He was Daniels’s
best friend in high school. She said she harbors no ill
feelings toward Taylor about the accident and hopes that
in time others will forgive him for what happened.
“I’m sure he didn’t mean what happened to
happen,” Sharp said. “Matt losing his life to
prison doesn’t make Justin’s life come back.”
The injury hindered her ability to speak, but through the
assistance of speech therapy, Sharp started speaking again
after only one month after the accident. The progress seemed
slow, but remarkable that in only one month she was already
whispering.
“When I first woke up I couldn’t talk at all.
I never forgot how to say things I just couldn’t get
them out,” Sharp said. “I remember my therapist
asking me to speak by making me angry. I was so frustrated
that I finally whispered, ‘I can’t.’”
She spent the next eight months learning how to change the
inflection on her voice, and getting her life back together.
”I don’t know if I will ever talk like I
did, but at least I am somewhere close to it,” she
said.
Despite her physical injuries, Sharp said that the hardest
thing she had to deal with was the loss of Daniels. She
was unable to attend his funeral because she was still in
a coma.
“He wasn’t just someone I was dating,” she
said. “He was someone I was going to marry,” she
said.
They met it high school and had been together ever since.
They lived together for two years, but she moved out two
months before the accident. She said she wanted to live
alone for a while before they got married. She still wears
his promise ring in remembrance of their commitment to each
other.
Before the accident, Sharp was an accounting major because
she wanted to help Daniels with his taxes. She said that
she was good with numbers and that it felt natural to deal
with math problems.
“He had a business and I wanted to help him, but after
the accident it reminded me of him too much,” she said.
“I just want to get out of school.”
After the accident, she switched her major to business management
in hopes that she would not be reminded of his absence.
After she graduates, Sharp wants to help manage a speech
therapy clinic and later go back to school for speech therapy.
“It was hard to deal with this injury,” she said.
“I woke up and everything changed.”
Besides a couple of scars on her arms, Sharp looks like
a regular woman with blonde curly hair and a warm smile.
She drives herself to school, goes to physical therapy,
and lives in her own apartment.
“I’ve been through a lot, but I don’t like
pity,” she said. “I’m trying to get my life
back or as back as I can get it. It’s hard to come
back to school because it reminds me of Justin, but school
work distracts me from what happened. I’m finally going
to school for me.”
Sharp wants to use her story to help others, whether by
working through a hospital or talking to a therapy group.
“Obviously I was kept here for a reason,” Sharp
said. “I want to help others, and talking about it
will help others heal, as well as me.”
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