If anyone at Sinclair Community College is a believer in fate, it’s 22-year-old student Lindsey Ricker.
Soon after graduating from high school, she was involved in a car accident and suffered a traumatic brain injury. However, Ricker said the accident was a good thing, because beforehand she wasn’t on a good path.
“In high school, I cared a lot about vanity and I wouldn’t go out of the house without makeup. And I cared about the way I looked and things like that and now I’m completely the opposite of that,” Ricker said. “I’m more spiritual and when I meet people, I look more at what they’re like inside instead of the outer stuff.”
She said she was in the backseat without her seat belt, when the driver ran a stop sign and was t-boned. The car flipped into a cornfield and she was ejected from the vehicle through the back window.
An off-duty paramedic who was in the area was first to respond to the accident and was able to get her breathing again. She was then transported to Miami Valley Hospital by Care Flight, where doctors told her parents that her brain was swelling and she needed brain surgery. However, even with the surgery, the doctors only gave her a 20 percent chance to live.
“Since I had such a slim chance of making it… It kind of scares me. I feel like I was saved for a reason, makes me feel pressured,” she said.
After the surgery, she was in a coma for two weeks and had to relearn who people were and how to do things on her own.
Ricker said she doesn’t remember past memories or her thought process before the accident and had to learn how to trust and rely on other people.
“I don’t remember my thought process at all,” she said. “It’s like you wake up and you don’t remember or know anything about what’s going on, who you are. So I mean, the only things that I know about my past life is what people have told me, because I don’t remember anything for myself back then.”
She said since her accident, she has been on mission trips and sells her own clothing, donating 50 percent of the profits to charity.
Ricker said she feels that the reason she is doing so well now is because while she was in the hospital, people prayed for her.
“Something that I might have seen and been like ‘I can’t do anything about that,’ now I’m more like, ‘no,’ I think we need to be the change. That’s like my motto,” she said.
She said before the accident, she would have never read for fun, but now she reads as a hobby, writes poetry and loves nature.
“I definitely feel like it was a good thing because the path I was on, it wouldn’t have been good,” she said. “I feel like if something happens, then it’s meant to be.”