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SALT LAKE CITY — 18-year-old Stansbury Park teen McKenzie Didericksen said a seat belt habit may have saved her Friday from becoming a statistic on Utah's fatality chart.
"I had fallen asleep and then I turned left into (an) oncoming traffic lane, but no one was in it, and then I kept going," she said.
Didericksen kept going. She veered off state Road 38 near Vernon, flipping a couple of times and landing in a ditch. A couple who saw the accident stopped to help and stayed with her for 45 minutes until ambulances arrived.
She had two punctured lungs, a broken wrist, a broken finger, a fractured pelvis, a fractured shoulder blade, a couple of broken ribs, and a lot of road rash. But she is surprising her doctors and on the fast road to recovery.
Didericksen was moving home from Arizona. After working an eight-hour shift, she packed up and hit the road.
"I was checking in my mind, 'Do I have my bike, do I have my clothes and everything? Do I have my seat belt on?' I made sure that I had that on the whole time," Didericksen said.
She doesn't remember being tired. She said she never thought anything like this would happen to her, but now she realizes it can happen to anyone at any place.
She was an hour from home, hoping to arrive in time for her brother's football game. Her mother and father got the call no parent wants to get.
"An officer and the principal came out onto the field and said to me, 'This is serious. You need to go now,'" said her father, Dano Didericksen.
The coach pulled her brother Coy Didericksen from the game and gave him the news.
"This is a big football game, they're doing really well this year and our little community loves football and everybody is there. So, when they saw the coach left they knew that something was wrong, because he would never leave," said McKenzie Didericksen.
That is just one example of the community rallying around McKenzie; even inspirational speaker Chad Hymas came for a visit, as well as the couple who stayed with her until help arrived. McKenzie Didericksen gets emotional when talking about that visit.
"I have been pretty good about not crying and keeping it all together and when they came in, I don't remember talking to them, but I remember their faces. When they came in I said, 'That's who saved me,'" she said.
And when her LDS bishop asked what they could do for her she wrote out: "Everyone do random acts of kindness for others."
"It was really important to me that I didn't make it about me or my family," Didericksen said.
Didericksen should be out of the hospital Wednesday.
She wants to fast-track her healing so she can still go on her mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to Nagoya, Japan, beginning Dec. 7, exactly two months after the accident.
