Taylor Swift is helping out a woman who was hit by a car while helping teens whose own vehicle hydroplaned on a rainy day — an act of bravery spotlighted in PEOPLE last week.

The singer, 36, recently donated $50,000 to a GoFundMe created to aid Ashley Taunton and her family amid Taunton’s recovery, PEOPLE can confirm.

Taunton, a 42-year-old certified nursing assistant, wife and mom of three from Connecticut, was driving on I-95 South in Rhode Island in July with her youngest daughter when she saw there had been some kind of incident ahead.

Taunton told PEOPLE that there was no way she couldn’t keep driving. “When I see there’s somebody in trouble, I tend to want to go help,” she said.

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Nearly 30 yards from the crash site, Taunton got out of her vehicle and told her daughter to stay and call Taunton’s husband.

As Taunton headed over to the stranded car, she saw a driver and two other passengers, all of whom were teenagers.

She noticed that “they were a little bit banged up, but seemed relatively okay.”

Suddenly, though, another vehicle hydroplaned and came barreling toward them as Taunton was speaking with the group.

According to a crash report Taunton previously shared with PEOPLE, the other driver lost control of that vehicle, which was traveling in the second lane of I-95 heading southbound, because road conditions were wet and slippery.

Ashley Taunton (center) with her kids.Ashley Taunton
With no time to spare, Taunton immediately pushed the teen closest to her — whose name she’d later learn was Vinny — out of harm’s way before she was struck by the oncoming vehicle.

“It just felt like a big explosion,” Taunton told PEOPLE. “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.”

Her daughter then rushed to her side and held her hand until help arrived. As she waited, she worried that she wouldn’t survive her injuries.

“I knew I had internal bleeding,” she said. “I thought, ‘That was it.’ Then in the ambulance as well, I was just praying — I didn’t want to die.”

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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.

Taunton spoke with PEOPLE from the hospital and said the doctors hadn’t yet given her a timetable of when she might be discharged but they estimated that recovery — including physical therapy — could take up to 12 months.

But most miraculously to her, she was alive, she said.

“I am so in awe of how evident God’s hand has been in all of this,” she told PEOPLE. “He just put all the right people in all the right places.”

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She told PEOPLE she also realized that she had met Vinny in 2020. He was the son of someone she had been friends with for 14 years.

They only discovered their connection when Taunton’s friend Jamie O’Rourke spotted Taunton’s husband and daughter walking by in the hospital and asked them what brought them in that day.

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

“Jamie just lost it and was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that was Ashley? She saved my son’s life,’ ” Taunton recalled being told.

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

In addition to the GoFundMe, which had raised more than $64,000 as of Friday, Aug. 28, a Meal Train has drawn over $16,000.

Taunton said that her ordeal taught her not to take things for granted.

“Life is very busy and it’s easy to postpone plans like, especially with friends and loved ones,” she said. “I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to make sure that I am taking time, even if it’s just going to grab a coffee with a friend, because we never know how you’re going to leave this earth.”