Life is nothing if not ironic. Three years ago, just a couple of weeks after I had written a story about novice riders and powerful motorcycles, I was hit by a driver while riding.
From what I gather, it was the classic bane of motorcyclists everywhere: a left-turning driver not watching where she was going, and all of a sudden, coming face-to-face with a rider. I was left with no escape and nowhere to go. She hit me head-on.
This scenario is the fourth most common cause of motorcycle accidents – some 8 per cent overall, according to the U.S. Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Many lawyers, however, dispute this, citing it as the most common type of accident situation.
Either way, it happens a lot, and the phrase “I just didn't see him” is a refrain well-known to attending paramedics and police. Indeed, that's just what the youthful driver kept saying over and over again to the police – or so I was told. I couldn't say for sure, because I was out cold, lying on the roadway, busted up, with a helmet full of my own blood.
Although I was knocked unconscious and lost my short-term memory temporarily, it gradually came back to me while I was in hospital: the blur of a vehicle of some kind, the sickening crunch of impact, and the ugliness and violence of the whole episode.
No time for fear, regret, panic or anger. One minute, I’m placidly riding down a familiar neighbourhood street, the next, a vehicle appears in front of me, and after that, nothing.
I eventually came to lying face-up on the wrong side of the road, with a paramedic shining a flashlight in my eyes, asking me what my name was, what day of the week it was and – absurdly, I thought – what the date was. Got the first two, but never did get the date right.
I was bleeding out of my left ear, my nose was broken, and my right leg a shattered mess. Eventually, I found out – among other things – that my right knee was fractured, and my right heel bone – the calcaneus – was broken and would require immediate surgery. After being bundled into the ambulance, it was off to the emergency ward, where I spent almost 12 hours laying on a gurney in front of the reception desk, vomiting uncontrollably, waiting for a bed. I went under the knife the next day.
The emergency ward in a large city is, in a word, a madhouse. I was comparatively lucky; things were relatively calm during my time there, but there was still a constant parade of broken bones, gasping asthma patients, motor vehicle accident victims, moaning octogenarians, and, worst of all, disruptive and abusive drunks and druggies who heap abuse on the very people trying to help them.
Late in the evening, a boozer who had obviously gotten the worst of a fight was wheeled in and he spent his entire time cursing the attending doctors and nurses. Police and security had to eventually be called in, but it didn’t matter. He wouldn’t let them take blood samples, wouldn’t allow them to take his blood pressure, insisted on smoking, challenged the intern to a fight, and wouldn’t put on the hospital gown. I would imagine that the amount of time hospitals across the country waste on these individuals is incalculable – while the rest of us sit there and wait to be treated. He should have been frog-marched off the premises.
