Putting your feet on the dashboard during a long car ride may seem perfectly natural and harmless — Audra Tatum certainly thought so until she was involved in an accident while sitting in the passenger seat.
"All my life I had my legs crossed and my foot on the dash," Tatum told CBS News affiliate KTVQ. "My husband always told me, 'You're going to get in a wreck someday, and you're going to break your legs.'"
Tatum always assured him she would put her feet down in time, but during a quick ride to pick up their children from her parents' house in 2015, the couple's car was hit by another, and the impact broke not only her ankle and femur, but sent her legs into her face and also broke her nose and shoulder.
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"The airbag went off, throwing my foot up and breaking my nose," Tatum told KTVQ. "I was looking at the bottom of my foot facing up at me."
Two years later, she is still recovering.
"I can't do my career as an EMS. I can't lift patients anymore," she told KTVQ. "I can't stand more than 4 hours at a time. Once I'm at that 4-hour mark I'm in tears."
After the accident, she said, she's learned that, "I'm not Superman. I couldn't put my foot down in time."
According to ABC News Channel 9, doctors at the hospital told Tatum that if she had her feet on the floor of the car, she "wouldn't have had any issues whatsoever."
Now, Tatum is warning others not to make the same mistake she did.
"I keep telling everybody, you don't want this life," she told KTVQ. "You don't want the pain and agony every day."
She also said that she knows that if the airbag wasn't deployed, her injuries may have been far worse.
"If I can save one person from doing this and they're not going through it, that would be wonderful," she told KTVQ.
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