By The Survivors Club Staff
September 18, 2009

A ride in the woods turned into a nightmare when Michelle Childers was skewered in the neck by a 13-inch tree branch that crashed through the passenger window of her truck.

"It was like a bomb had went off," remembers Childers, 22, who was driving on a forested road in northern Idaho.  "I had no idea what happened. I had to ask."

Her husband looked over and saw a thick branch from a spruce tree sticking out of the left side of his wife's neck.

“I just saw that stick going through her neck and I knew I needed to get help quick,” Daniel Childers told NBC's TODAY show today. “I told her it was in her neck.”

The couple drove to the Lochsa Lodge near the Idaho-Montana border to call for help and was flown by helicopter to St. Patrick Hospital in Missoula, Mont.

Doctors discovered the branch barely missed her jugular vein and windpipe, plunging all the way to the back of her left shoulder. It took them six hours to remove the branch and stitch her up.

“I don’t know how I’m still alive,” Michelle said, staring at pieces of the branch that she had brought along to the TODAY studio. “I don’t know.”