Three recalls are in effect for Toyotas sold in the U.S. They affect 5.6 million cars, including one involved in a serious crash in Carroll, Iowa Thursday. The driver questions whether an accelerator defect is to blame. She hopes an answer will come this week.

Laura Wernimont spent her 75th birthday at Nebraska Medical Center Sunday, recovering from a punctured lung, as well as a broken jaw, cheekbone and vertebrae.

She said early last month she received a recall notice on her 2007 Toyota Avalon’s accelerator pedal. Wernimont scheduled a repair but had to cancel it when her husband, Clarence, died. She rescheduled for this coming Monday, an appointment that she said came too late.

"It's terribly painful," she said from her hospital bed. Though her jaw was wired shut, she wanted to talk to warn other drivers about what she sees as a real danger. Her brother-in-law Bob Schroeder, helped tell her story.

Wernimont said she was driving to church about 8:15 a.m. Thursday, going around 20 miles an hour. She said she was approaching an intersection from a good distance and had not yet hit the brake pedal.

“I sped up so fast, I bet I was going a hundred miles an hour the way it sped. It just kept going faster and faster and I couldn't do anything about it."

Schroeder said, “She cut the corner, went through a big snow bank to try to stop, try to slow it down and there was a school bus in the way. And the school bus ran over her hood." He said three children were on board, but they and the driver are all okay.

After colliding with the bus, Wernimont’s car finally came to a rest in a second snow drift, she said. Pictures of the damage show her front end caved in, the top cut off so that rescuers could get Wernimont out. She said she asked a rescuer she knew, "Did I kill somebody?” And he assured me, I didn't."

Carroll police had no comment over the weekend, except to say the cause of the crash has not been determined. It is under investigation. But Wernimont believes it's tied to her Avalon's recall.

"I bought it because I felt it was the best car on the market,” she said, “because I felt like I probably wouldn't own too many more."

Faith, she claimed, that was misplaced when she bought the car brand-new three years ago.

"I have worked hard. I helped my husband all the time when he was alive, and I was happy to do that. Now, I'm afraid,” she said through tears, “I may have problems in my life."

A long recovery ahead will require skilled nursing care once she is released from the hospital. What she’s going through, she said, she wouldn’t wish on anybody.

"Now I worry about what might happen to other people. They could get killed. And, imagine if they were on a highway. I was in a slow place,” she said.

Wernimont wants to offer advice to others affected by the recalls. "I would tell them not to drive it period until everything (is repaired). And then, I don’t know, I hope it’s right when they fix it," she said.

“You don’t realize it until it hits close to home that this is actually true. This is going on,” Schroeder said.

He has been in communications with his sister-in-law’s insurance agency. He said they told him a Toyota representative is planning a visit to Carroll to look into the matter.

Calls made to the company as well as to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration were not immediately returned.