Woman Whose Buttocks Pierced By Pole: Don't Text And Drive

ELIZABETH, Colo. (CBS4) - A woman whose buttocks were impaled by a four-inch-diameter metal pole says her near-brush with death is a lesson often given but not heeded: Don't text and drive.

The accident happened Wednesday as Jahnz, 35, left the parking lot of Elizabeth Middle School, where her daughter attends, and sent a voice text to a business associate.

She glanced down briefly at the screen to confirm the text was correct when she slammed into a guard rail, which pierced her car's left headlight, rammed through the engine compartment, sliced into her left buttock and emerged from the other side. The pole pinned her to her seat. She says she was traveling at roughly 20 mph.

Firefighters sawed through both ends of the pole to free her. The rescue took nearly an hour. She was then taken to Parker Hospital where doctors removed the remaining segment, which a picture showed to be about three to four feet. The pole had embedded itself several inches into her.

Doctors said it barely missed her vital organs.

She said it hadn't yet sunk it: "I truly could be dead."

Jahnz credits God for her survival: "He put it in the perfect spot so I could be here to be with my family, raise my children."

Her daughter, Emily, echoed that: "It's a miracle because if it went any higher, she would have been gone."

"You don't know what you have got until it's gone, and I almost lost her," her husband, Nicholas, said and added: "Please, if you need to text, stop. Pull off to the side of the road. Wait."

Jahnz said the accident was preferable to her injuring someone else due to her negligence.

"That would have just killed me -- if I had done something else to somebody else," she said. "I don't think I could have lived with it."