A mom is still recovering over a month after she was struck by a vehicle while helping a group of teens whose car hydroplaned on a rainy day.

“It feels weird if people call me a hero,” Ashley Taunton, 42, tells PEOPLE from her bed at Providence’s Rhode Island Hospital. “I’m just a mom. Somebody was hurting. That’s just what you do. But I’m glad that I was there at that moment.”

On July 18, Taunton, a Connecticut wife and mother of three, was driving on I-95 South in Rhode Island with her youngest daughter when she saw there’d been some kind of accident ahead.

Taunton, who used to be a certified nursing assistant, says there was no way she wasn’t stopping. “When I see there’s somebody in trouble, I tend to want to go help,” she adds.

About 30 yards from the scene of the crash, she got out of the car, telling her daughter to stay back and call her dad.

As she made her way to the stranded vehicle, she saw a driver and two other passengers, all of whom were teenagers.

“I went over there and [they] were getting out of the car,” she recalls. “They were a little bit banged up, but seemed relatively okay.”

As Taunton spoke with the teens, another vehicle that had hydroplaned came barreling toward them.

According to an official crash report Taunton shared with PEOPLE, the driver lost control of the vehicle, which was traveling in the second lane of I-95 South, because the road conditions were wet and slippery.

PEOPLE contacted the Rhode Island Department of Public Safety, but did not receive an immediate response.

With no time to spare, Taunton immediately pushed the teen closest to her — the driver, whose name she’d come to learn was Vinny — out of the way before she was struck by the oncoming vehicle.

“It just felt like a big explosion,” Taunton says of the moment that car hit her. “I just remember being on the ground and I could see my ankle was just hanging there. I went to try to get up and I couldn’t breathe.”

Taunton’s daughter raced to her side, holding her mom’s hand until help arrived.

“It felt like forever before the rescuers could get there,” she says, noting that throughout that interminable wait, she worried she wouldn’t survive her injuries. “I knew I had internal bleeding,” she adds. “I thought, ‘That was it.’ Then in the ambulance as well, I was just praying, I didn’t want to die.”

She was admitted to Rhode Island Hospital with multiple life-threatening injuries, including bilateral internal carotid artery dissection, liver and spleen lacerations, multiple rib fractures, and a ruptured diaphragm.

But most importantly, despite her injuries — and the subsequent surgeries that followed — she was alive.

“I am so in awe of how evident God’s hand has been in all of this,” she says. “He just put all the right people in all the right places to make it so that I’m going to recover.”

Taunton later received surprising news from her husband Joe about Vinny, the 19-year-old driver she pushed out of the way: She’d met him before.

Although she hadn’t seen Vinny in six years  — which explains why she didn’t recognize him at the scene of the crash — the teen was the son of somebody Taunton had been friends with for 14 years.

They only found out when Taunton’s friend, Jamie O’Rourke, spotted Taunton’s husband and daughter walking by and asked them what brought them to the hospital that day.

As soon as O’Rourke heard that Taunton had been hit by a car on I-95, she knew exactly what had happened.

“Jamie just lost it and was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that was Ashley? She saved my son’s life,’ ” the mom of three recalls being told.

Speaking with CBS affiliate WPRI, O’Rourke said of Taunton: “She was so courageous to put herself in danger.”

Taunton says the doctors haven’t yet given her a timetable of when she might be discharged from the hospital, but they estimate that recovery — which will include physical therapy — could take up to 12 months.

Although she may not be back on her feet just yet, Taunton says she couldn’t be more appreciative of the support showered upon her and her family from the community through a GoFundMe and Meal Train.