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LAKEWOOD, Colo. (AP) — A woman stranded in her car for up to a week after crashing off a Colorado highway says thinking about her four children helped her survive.
Kristin Hopkins' feet were crushed after landing upside down off U.S. Highway 285. She didn't have food or water.
"The only thing I had to eat was one packet of instant oatmeal. I tried to eat some of that and it was just so dry — I didn't have any water — that it just didn't work," NBC quoted her as saying.
The single mother was discovered May 4 after a passersby happened to notice some glare from below the road.
She doesn't remember going off the road but does remember waking up in the car, upside down.
"One thing I did, and I don't know why, I tried to turn the car on. I don't know where I was going to go. It was upside down," Hopkins told KUSA.
In her first interviews since the crash, Hopkins says the first thing she thought after waking up in her upside-down car was that it was her turn to pick up her children at school. Later, she thought about how she had to get back to them because they needed a mother.
"They're my life. I am what I am because of my kids," she said.
She also told NBC she never thought she wouldn't survive.
"I was honestly optimistic the entire time," she said.
Her feet and part of her legs were amputated and Hopkins has begun rehabilitation.
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