>I'm told I may never get my memory of the incident
>back, though.

If you got hit on the head during the accident, then it's very likely you'll never remember it. Short term memory is fleeting, and is only good for five to seven minutes. If you get conked on the head and knocked out or "knocked silly" (the "technical" term for temporarily losing the ability to make long term memories) then that prevents your short term memory from dumping to long-term storage. The last thing you'll remember from before the accident will be whatever was last dumped to long-term memory, which could be as long as seven minutes before the actual trauma, and the first think you'll remember afterwards is whatever was going on when your brain unscrambled itself enough to start archiving things again. It sounds to me from your description that you were conscious through the whole thing, but the trauma was obviously bad enough to short-circuit your brain temorarily and prevent you from forming long-term memories.

This is actually used in detective work. If a person claims to remember everything right up until the very second they got hit on the head, they're almost certainly lying. Anything still in short term memory is lost after any head trauma severe enough to cause loss of consciousness, and that almost certainly includes the time of the actual event itself.

Anyway, it's good to hear that you somehow had presence of mind enough to get the heck out of that car, even if you can't remember exactly how. *hug*

-- Dave