One very lucky Boston teenager survived a harrowing 45 minutes while dining with her family on April 19, 2017.

“I thought she was going to die,” her younger sister explained with tears in her eyes. “There was nothing I could do. I felt so helpless!”

The teen, Harper Bolton, is just “happy to be alive” after suffering a traumatic separation from her cell phone during the family dinner. “I didn’t check the battery before we sat down to eat because I was busy texting my friends and posting on Instagram. I will never make that mistake again. Never!”

As a result of her lapse of judgment, Ms. Bolton had to endure the entire dinner without any connection to her peers, while her cell phone charged on the kitchen counter nearby.

“I couldn’t even share a photo of the food,” she explained. “I had no thumbs-up emoji to let everyone know that it tasted really good. I was completely cut-off from humanity!”

During the dinner, her mother became alarmed when she saw storm clouds through the picture window. “The temperature was dropping as the sun was setting and I knew my daughter would have precious little time to make plans with her friends to get a ride to the party that evening. It was a race against time.”

A race that her parents had adequately prepared her for, thankfully. Ever resourceful, Harper Bolton made the lifesaving but agonizing decision to forego the remainder of her meal in order to run upstairs to use the landline in her father’s home office before all the seats in her friend’s car were spoken for.

With little time left, she secured a connection via the landline and finalized the arrangements for the evening’s transportation to the party. But by then, her dinner was cold and no one was left at the table.

“I was trembling,” she cried, as she remembered feeling that all hope was lost. “I will never sit down to dinner again without checking my cell phone battery in advance. Life is short and the connection to my friends via cell phone is a precious gift that I will not take for granted in the future.”

Her father concurred. “I’m just thankful she survived.”

The lucky teen made it to the party with her friends and suffered only a mild stomach ache from the fistfuls of junk food she shoved in her mouth to abate the hunger pains caused by the abbreviated dinner. But the selfies posted to Facebook and Instagram and the endless party updates on Twitter showed all her friends and followers her newfound appreciation for life despite the near-death experience hours earlier.

Harper Bolton is one very lucky girl, indeed. ♥

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Janet Eve Josselyn is a regular contributor to HuffPost. Her writing has also appeared in Parent.co, BLUNTmoms, The Satirist, Sammiches and Psych Meds and Mock Mom. She graduated from Colby College, Harvard Graduate School of Design and Boston College Law School. She toiled for years as a litigator at a Boston law firm that is no longer in business. Prior to her meteoric rise in the law, she worked as an architect in Boston, designing some pretty hideous buildings that have probably been torn down by now. Her novel, Thin Rich Bitches, is set in the town where she lives which explains why she has no friends.