A drunk-driving tragedy--with a surprising twist: a car accident that momentarily claimed 27-year-old Sarah Panzau's life ended up forever changing the way she lives.(Real-Life Reads: THE COSMO POST)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

After hanging out with friends at a bar past closing time, Sarah Panzau, then 21, called it a night a little after 4 a.m. She'd been drinking for eight hours.

She exited Highway 64 as she'd done many nights before, on an off-ramp whose posted speed limit was 25 mph. Only this time, she didn't slow down her '96 Saturn. Instead, Sarah began to take the sharp curve at 72 mph, then panicked and tried to swerve back onto the highway. Her car flipped twice, slammed upside down onto a guardrail, and skidded 25 feet before flipping a third time. The back windshield shattered, and Sarah was ejected from the car.

She hadn't been wearing a seat belt, and her blood alcohol content was 0.308--which is almost four times the legal limit in Illinois.

By file time an ambulance arrived--one happened to be driving past the accident scene--Sarah was legally dead. Her heart had stopped, and she had already lost so much blood that she was no longer even bleeding. Paramedics working to revive her looked at what they thought was a gruesome corpse and prepared to call file coroner when Sarah amazingly gasped for air.

Back From the Brink

At Saint Louis University Hospital, doctors had little hope she'd survive. She had massive head injuries, lacerations 'all over her body, a severed left arm, a broken hip, a leg that had been completely twisted around, and crushed ribs. Sarah was put on a ventilator and into a drag-induced coma. "If she didn't die from 'all her injuries, doctors thought she'd very well die from infection," says Sarah's mother, Cindi, an army nurse who was forced to identify her mangled daughter in the hospital. "She was that bad. I didn't know if Sarah would be okay until she woke up from her coma two weeks later. One of the surgeons asked how she was doing, and she gave a thumbs-up."