In her first interview since surviving a near-fatal car wreck six months ago, Taylor gives Us Weekly a first-hand account of her brush with death, painful recovery and joyful reunion with her kids.

The 26-year-old model says she still has lingering nightmares after her April 29 accident in Atlanta and also faces the prospect of more surgery to fix a curvature of the spine that resulted from her being bedridden for two and a half months while she recovered in a hospital.

Taylor sustained severe internal injuries when the car she was riding in struck a utility pole. The driver, Taylor's friend James Renegar, lost control of his 1993 Nissan Maxima on an off-ramp when he looked down to answer his cell phone.

Taylor, who was wearing her seatbelt and initially seemed unhurt, later began having intense stomach pains and was rushed to Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital in critical condition where she remained until July, when doctors finally gave her the okay to go home.

Recalling her first moments after the crash, the runway star said she stumbled out of the car and laid down on a patch of grass holding her stomach where it "hurt so bad" that she began to cry, then passed out just as the ambulances arrived.

At the hospital, surgeons worked overtime to save her life, performing more than 40 operations. As Taylor says, "I now have scars all over my stomach--it looks like I have a 16 pack."

In those first critical days, doctors told her manager Lou Taylor (no relation), to prepare her family for the possibility that she might not make it. But, despite a few setbacks, Taylor rallied and became stronger.

"When I woke up from surgery, I thought I was a vegetable. I couldn't move or talk because of the breathing tube and the ventilator," says Taylor. "It was very uncomfortable, and it was hard to swallow, but that machine kept me alive."

She also said her body ballooned to four times its normal size because of fluid buildup.

What seemed like a few days was really a two-month hospital stay, a drowsy Taylor later learned. For much of that period, the model was under heavy sedation and could only communicate with her family by mouthing words (the first word she whispered was "Coke" because she says she was really thirsty).

Taylor was very weak from having been bedridden for nearly two and a half months and was forced to relearn everything, even how to write. But what kept her going, she says, were her boys.

"All I wanted was to live to see my boys again. They gave me the strength to fight," says Taylor, who could only see them through video since they were too young to be allowed into the intensive-care ward of the hospital.

Her six-year-old twins, Jake and Hunter, were being cared for by their father, Taylor's ex-husband, Matt Martinez, at home in Florida. When she finally did see them at the end of June, she said she cried for hours and they spent the whole night with her.

The former Sports Illustrated swimsuit star said she was also touched by the thousands of get-well cards sent to her by fans and the kindness of strangers, one of whom, an Atlanta man, even offered to donate his liver.

And in those painful days, the last thing Taylor said she was thinking about was her career as one of the fashion industry's most photographed faces.

"A job is a job," she says. "I am much more interest in life. I am just so grateful right now that I can move my arms and legs, that I can breathe, that I came out of this nightmare alive, that I'm with my boys."

In addition to her crooked spine, Taylor says her legs are numb from nerve damage, some of her hair has fallen out from the antibiotics (don't worry guys, it'll grow back), and the scars on her stomach "will never fade."

But, if there's any good that's come out of this difficult period of her life, she says she has learned to have a sense of humor and not worry so much about the future of her modeling career as much as appreciate the fact she's alive.

Says Taylor: "I definitely think the big man upstairs is saying, 'You've gotta live. It's not your time yet.' "