| 5:50pm |
Leave work on my bicycle for a training ride of approximately
10 miles to finish at World of Bikes on Gilbert
|
| 6:17pm |
My ride is a little shorter than I was expecting and I arrive at
the bike shop early. I call my girlfriend to tell her that I have arrived
and she tells me she will get there in about 15 minutes.
|
| 6:18pm |
I bring my bike into the shop and the owner, Ryan (who incidentally
sold me my bike), takes my bike into the back and tells me to wait
up front for a minute.
|
| 6:23pm |
Five minutes later Ryan brings my bike back out and tells me it is
finished already. I thank him for his speedy service and pay for my
new freewheel. Since I have about ten minutes to kill, I decide to go
out and test my new gears in the parking lot.
|
| 6:25pm |
I love my new gears, they seem to engaged and work much smoother
than my old freewheel (although that might have all been in my head).
I am very pleased, but I decide that I really should test out these
gears at high speed so that I can get a real good feel for what they
can do. I leave the parking lot and head to the nearest hill as
quickly as I can. That hill just so happens to be on Clinton Street
in front of RT's the bar. I know that there are some railroad tracks
at the bottom of the hill, but I am in a rush because my girlfriend will be
arriving soon, and I have taken them at 32mph before without ever
having a problem, so I decide to use that hill regardless.
|
| 6:30pm |
I take the hill at a good clip, and because of my new freewheel,
I can shift and continue to pedal even at the bottom of the hill.
Right as I hit the railroad tracks I look down at my computer and
see that I am only going 30mph, so I start to pedal even harder.
Between throwing my bike from side to side pedaling, and the vibrations
of the railroad tracks, my handlebars develop an oscillation that I
quickly cannot control. I remember thinking to myself, "I am
going to fall here, no avoiding that. How should I fall so that I
don't hurt myself badly." As my wheel turns to the left one last
time, it catches the ground and I am vaulted highside over my handlebars.
I try my best to hit the ground on all fours and roll to my back so that
my backpack and helmet can take the brunt of the sliding. As I skid
to a stop on my back (watching my bike sliding behind me for what seems
like forever), I remember jumping to my feet and surprising myself with
how little everything hurts. That is when I look down at my left knee
and notice the very large laceration. I don't like to look at injuries
like that so I take one quick look and as I can see my knee bone, I
realize that I am not getting out of this without some stitches. I
hobble over to the sidewalk and as I bend my knee so that I can sit
down, blood squirts out of the wound like a fountain. I did happen
to look down just as this happens and, let me tell you, it was not
what I wanted to see. I think I will remember that image of my knee
bleeding for the rest of my life. Since I didn't have a camera, the
following image is an "artist's rendition" of what I saw.
|
| 6:32pm |
As I am laying there in shock, I am not thinking clearly and I
start to call my girlfriend because I didn't want to have to pay for an
ambulance ride to the ER since my girlfriend should have been only a few
blocks away from me at that time. I call her three times but I
cannot get ahold of her. Unbeknownst to me she has forgotten her
cell phone as she left to pick me up. Luckily a few passing people
stop and convince me to call 911. As soon as the ambulance gets there,
my girlfriend calls me and I frantically explain what happened and that she
needs to come and pick up my bike for me. As she drives up, I think
sight of an ambulance makes her expect even worse injuries than I have.
After she finds out it is only my knee she even laughs at me a little.
|
| ~6:45pm |
In the ER I am examined and taken care of. X-rays are taken of
my knee and they cannot find any major breaks, but they tell me that
the cut is so deep that they need to examine the
synovial fluid
sac
behind the kneecap for ruptures. The way that they test this is to
inject the sac with a blue dye and see if it leaks out. If you ever
have to receive this procedure, I'm sure you will agree with me that
it is the MOST PAINFUL THING EVER. Even after they find a rupture
and remove most of the excess dye from my fluid sac, I am still in
an incredible amount of pain. They have to give me 100mg of
Fentanyl for the pain. It helps but a short time later it has
worn off enough that they end up giving me another 100mg. As I am
later taken to my hospital room to wait for surgery, the pain
increases again to a point where they have to put me on an IV drip
of morphine. Not to mention the fact that I am incredibly hungry
and thirsty because of my training ride right before my accident,
and I can't eat or drink anything because I have to wait for my
surgery! Suffice it to say, that night was not fun.
|
| 3:30am |
I finally go into surgery at 3:30 in the morning. I don't
remember much of anything until about 7:00, but when I finally
emerge from the haze I am amazed by how little pain I am in.
|
| Fri, Sep 2 |
The only things that sucked that day were the fact that I had to
pee a large amount every hour because of the saline drip that I
was on, and the bad reaction to morphine that I develop. Apparenly
morphine sometimes makes people itch very badly... and I am one of
those people. But the itching was a very welcome annoyance after
the amount of pain I had been in the night before. I have to spend
that night in the hospital and wear a knee brace for 9 days. Because
of the loose stitching that they used to close my wound, if I bend
my knee I might open the wound again. I also cannot remove my
bandage and that makes personal hygiene quite the challenge. But
I get used to the baths. The amount of road rash that I received from
the accident is surprisingly small. I didn't even get any on either
of my hands which I thought were the first to hit the ground (I
now realize that my knee must have received that honor):
And my bandage on my knee is not too annoyingly large. I even get
used to the knee brace after a couple of days:
|
| Mon, Sep 12 |
I get to go back to the doctor and get my stitches remove and
brace taken off. I have a very small range of motion in my knee but
the physical therapist is able to take me from 50 to 73 degrees of
motion in a few minutes. The doctor tells me 6 weeks before I will
be able to run, but the PT seemed to think it would be much less.
I'm with the PT on this one ;) The following pictures show the
aftermath of the accident. I honestly did not think the cut was as
incredibly large as it was. The incision that you see in the pictures
was not made for the surgery, that was all me. Click on the last
picture for a full size image to really get a good view of the wound:
I also finally go to my garage and check out my bike now that I can
walk around a little. I luckily explained my accident to one of my
neighbors and he offered to look at my bike for me since he used to
be a bike mechanic, and he had a Truing stand in his garage. My front
wheel was by far the worst off with a wobble that looked to me like
it was almost a full inch in each direction. He was able to get the
rim back to a 1 - 2mm tolerance with an unexpected trick. Once he
found the main source of the bend, he took the rim and slammed it
on the ground in the other direction. I mean a full out two-handed,
over the head, full swing. I told him that as nice as the people are
at World of Bikes, I'm sure they never would have tried something as
drastic as that. So I was very happy when he was able to fix the
wobble in both the front and back wheels to within a normal tolerance.
It was actually very impressive to watch. The only thing left was to
fix my front brake, since the bike must have landed on it when it hit
the ground. He wasn't able to do much with that, but all that I
will need to replace is a spring clip and then I should be good to go!
I just hope the next time that I get on a bike I'm not afraid to get
up to full speed!! I was also sent a link to this
article that might
have saved me if I had known about it earlier. So for anyone that
wants to know how to save a front shimmy, read that article before
you bike down a hill and full speed next time ;)
|
