Until then, the 34-year-old Cary resident led a relatively charmed life: happily married with three young children and a successful career as an attorney.

It changed when a drunken driver headed to a Bojangles turned into the path of his car.

Bradford initially thought he escaped unscathed. But what happened the next day set off a series of events that led to an ending no one - least of all Bradford - could have envisioned.

"Whether you're religious or not, I think it's definitely an example of the Lord working in mysterious ways," Bradford says.

The tale begins about 5:30 p.m. July 15, 2009, in Greensboro.

Bradford, a lawyer, was returning to Cary after conducting a deposition. He had no time to react when a car veered in front of him. He slammed on his brakes but still hit the vehicle at about 35 miles per hour.

Thanks to his airbag, he emerged only shaken. The woman who hit him was arrested but not seriously injured. With his car mostly totaled, his wife picked him up and they decided to grab a bite to eat at the Bojangles.

"I was feeling alright," he remembers. "I just wanted to get home and get to sleep."

Bradford woke the next morning with a headache. Just to be cautious, he decided to visit an urgent care center, where he received a CAT scan.

"The doctor looked at it and said it was very abnormal, not the type of thing they would expect to see after a car accident," Bradford recalls.

The doctor sent him to WakeMed. "A doctor with a really poor bedside manner came in told me that I had a brain tumor on my front left lobe but that he didn't know anything about it - talk to a neurologist," he says.

As his wife, Andrea Bradford, drove him home from WakeMed, he began thinking about his girls - twins Zoe and Riley, now 5, and Ellie Grace, now 2.

"It was a very emotional car ride home," he says. "The thing that scared me the most was that I might not be able to see my daughters grow up."

Bradford's wife understood what it was like to sense mortality. Just a few months earlier, she had a stroke after the birth of her third child.

Like her husband, her medical crisis began only as a serious headache.

She began to slur her speech, then lost partial sight. At that point, her sister took her to WakeMed in Cary.

Andrea Bradford remembers that night - March 1, 2009 - clearly. The doctor told her she had blood pooling in her brain.

"I asked him, 'Could I die from this?' He said, 'Yes you can die from this. You should call and say your goodbyes,' " she recalls.

She called her family to say goodbye.

But after a week's stay in the hospital and about two months of recovery at home, she recovered most of her physical capacities, and her emotional health rebounded. "I gained a new lease on life," she says.

Surviving her brush with death gave her a new outlook. And it helped her see how her husband's personality had been changing.

She remembered a conversation in May 2009, a couple of months after her stroke.

She was talking to her husband about her new attitude.

"Aren't you excited for me?" she recalls saying. "And Jeff said, 'I know I should be but I'm having a hard time really getting excited,'

"He was very, very emotionless," she adds. "He was flatlining. This was not the man I dated."

It wasn't long before Bradford's attitude changed, too. He underwent brain surgery July 29, 2009, at the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University.

Dr. Allan Friedman was able to remove the entire tumor. And Jeff Bradford's zest for life came back almost immediately. His wife had to stop him from going outside and jogging after he got home from his five-day hospital stay.

"Since the tumor was taken out, I feel like I felt in high school," Jeff Bradford says. "I feel like I can beat the world again, I feel like I can do anything. I'm unbelievably blessed that they caught (the tumor) when they did, under the circumstance that they did."

Dr. Katy Peters, currently one of Bradford's attending physicians at Duke, agrees Bradford was lucky. His tumor, she says, was benign and the least aggressive type. But she says eventually it could have become malignant or caused seizures -- which could be fatal if they occurred in certain situations, such as while driving.

Peters, a neuro-oncologist, says the position of the tumor also could have affected Bradford's mood. It is common for tumors in that part of the brain to cause depression or irritability.

"It's very subtle," she says. "They may not notice it themselves, but maybe family members do."

Tests continue to show that Bradford's surgery was successful, she says, adding: "He has a very good prognosis for complete recovery."

Bradford's wife remembered the exact moment when she realized how much the surgery had helped her husband. It was about a week after the operation and for the first time since before the surgery he took a shower with no help from her.

"He came out of the shower and said, 'I'm totally back,' and I knew that he was," Andrea Bradford recalls. "It was a joyful moment for our family."

Bradford continues to work as an attorney for Ellis & Winters in Cary. But in his spare time, he has decided to chase his musical dream more earnestly. Bradford played guitar since age 16 and started writing songs in college. He even was a member of a band at Duke Law School but only jammed with friends occasionally since then.

Three days before he went under the knife, he did something he had always wanted to do - he booked time in a studio to record some of his music. Now he is trying to "take it to another level."

Since the wreck, Bradford has begun performing more often. He reassembled his band, and in December 2009, the group won a competition at the Pour House in Raleigh. They are working on an album.

Jeff Bradford has a sense of humor about the wreck that saved his life and his wife's illness - he has written playful songs about both. His band performed the song about the crash in April at Angels Among Us, a benefit road race hosted by Duke. The lyrics say, in part:

Thank you for a case of the munchies

Thank you for the voices in your head

That told you to go to Bojangles

To use a coupon to buy some chicken

Were it not for you I might just be dead

The couple's adventurous year has immensely improved their relationship, Andrea Bradford says. They proved to each other, she adds, that they will always be there for each other in good times and bad.

"It took away all the questions," she says.

She also says she no longer sweats the small stuff.

"I haven't complained about his boxer shorts being on the floor for over two years," she quips. "I'm thrilled to have his boxer shorts there, because that means he's here."