The Accident

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Three years ago I was hit by a car. 

Unfortunately this is something far too many cyclists experience. We are all at risk for this accident simply by the nature of what we do. We share the road with cars who outnumber us, outweigh us, and sometimes brush by us so close it makes your adrenaline fizz and your hairs stand on end.

There are many articles written on the issue of car-cyclist interaction and the ethics of such. We are too often seen as an annoyance, a fly on the windshield, not a living, breathing human being with a family, a job, a life. How many times have we all been 'buzzed' by an irate driver who wanted to teach us a lesson for getting in their space, for being on their road? Too many times I'm sure. My favorite analogy for this I read on the internet some years ago. Threatening a cyclist with your car is the same as walking up to someone on the sidewalk and pointing a gun at their face. As we all learned in driver's ed a car is a deadly weapon. Threatening a cyclist with a car is assault with a deadly weapon. Would you threaten someone with a gun simply because they were taking up too much space on the sidewalk?

Is this what it's come too?

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I've had many interactions with cars that have left an absolute foul taste in my mouth. I abhor the interaction with a driver where they accuse me of being some car-hating, un-showering, tax-dodging idiot because I happen to be riding a bike. Oh no good sir, you've caught me! It's true that I don't drive a car just like you, I've never worked a day in my life, I pedal around weaving all along the road tossing flower petals in the potholes and I haven't showered in a year. Give me a break. You would think I'm exaggerating but unfortunately I've been accused of all of these things!

But I like trees...

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With all this malice, and this ignorance floating around for cyclists you would think that every accident was a deliberate attack. In my case however this was not so. In so many instances the driver gives the same excuse: "I didn't see them."

I was hit by a car, and it wasn't by some gun-toting, 12-cylinder driving whacko with a thirst for my blood. It was a guy with his young daughter in the back seat. He didn't see me.

I'd like to tell you this story, of how I was hit by a car, and the ramifications it has had on my life as a cyclist.

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It was November, my second year racing 'cross and I was trying to squeeze in a training ride before darkness. It was chilly, so I was dressed in my full winter ensemble, thermal jacket and booties included. I completed my loop and I was heading for home. There are several different ways to get back to my house, but that night, for efficiencies sake since it was getting dark I chose the route through the center of town.

I crested a little hill and was picking up speed into the downslope. The lane coming in the other direction was bumper to bumper with traffic, the headlights bright, lined up in a row. Most of the time I have a habit of giving drivers I see waiting to make a turn a little wave as I'm approaching. I try to make eye contact and let them know that I'm coming faster than they think I am, please don't pull out in front of me. That evening I saw a car on my right waiting to make a left turn. I remember thinking to myself as I got closer to him that there was no way he would be able to make the left turn, the traffic going the opposite way was so clogged.

I was wrong.

As I reached my maximum speed for the small descent, probably something between 20-25mph, he suddenly pulled out in front of me. I remember thinking, ohSHIT I'm not gonna make it! I swerved to the left, towards oncoming traffic in a last desperate attempt to avoid the hood.

I took the impact on my right side, in the front of my bike and on my right leg and foot. I remember vividly being popped up into the air, detached from my bike at some point, turned completely upside-down. Time seemed to slow, and I had a moment of contemplation, upside-down flying over the hood of a car like some airborne camel, limbs akimbo. Oh. Fuck. This is gonna be bad.

I hit the ground in the middle of the road, and then popped up like a daisy. It was absolutely surreal. I was standing wide-eyed in the road, traffic stopped both ways, clutching my leg. This must be what deers feel like after they get hit. I had a moment of elation. I can stand! If I can stand it means I'm alive! This seems to be some sort of reflex I have. Even when I've slid out and crashed in a race my first instinct is to stand up. I am the mole that will not go down in whack-a-mole. 

I'm in that pile somewhere.

After I realized that I was not a bloody smear on the road, and that I was whole, and relatively intact I remember being flooded with rage, turning towards the car, hobbling at the hood still clutching my leg and screaming expletives.

This must have been quite a scene.

Two very nice ladies who had been driving the other direction were suddenly escorting me to the side of the road and sitting me down on the curb. I was shaking, and I think I was mumbling , oh God, to myself. Before I knew it there was a firetruck, and a police car, and an ambulance. At some point I think I remembered my bike and panicked. Someone had grabbed it for me. It didn't look good but I didn't really have the mental wherewithal to examine it. Later I would realize that the impact had not only taco-ed the front wheel, but had crumpled the fork and snapped it. RIP pretty 'cross bike.

I was put in the ambulance and they took my shoe off. I had to help with my booties because the EMTs were a little bit confounded by them. After a quick examination they declared that I was banged up but probably nothing was broken, I didn't have to go to the hospital unless I thought I needed to. I did remember at this point that ambulance rides, while novel, are expensive so I politely declined. There was enough adrenaline coursing through me that I wasn't feeling much pain at that point.

The policeman asked if I wanted a ride home. I said yes. Duh. What am I going to do, carry my mangled bike and hobble home? I watched them try to stick my bike in the trunk of a police car, jamming the front end in and slamming the hood down on it's mangled wheel. I cringed. I was shepherded into the back for the very short ride to my house. The back? Are you kidding me? My bruises were starting to hurt and the back had no seat belts and was made entirely of plastic. I felt like a criminal. Wasn't I the one that had just gotten hit with a two ton vehicle? Every time he turned I would slide in the seat and slam my bruised body into the door, all the while looking behind me and wincing every time the swaying hood slammed into my bike, which was dangling half-way out of the trunk.

Finally we made it back to my apartment and I was dumped outside of my house. Thankfully my landlord was there and he helped me get myself and my bike inside. I changed, barely looking at my foot. I called my boyfriend and told him what had happened and to come over. I remember hanging up the phone and sitting down on my couch. All the cacophony and the terror and the adrenaline suddenly behind me. I was alone, my foot was hurting. That's when I started to cry.

The actual act of getting hit was not nearly so terrible as I had heard many accidents be involving cyclists. I did end up going to the hospital, and then later to the bar, so really that whole night, stretching into the morning I don't remember as being awful. I was filled with the adrenaline of being alive. It's the aftermath that still has it's claws in me, still, three years after the fact.

I didn't hit my head at all during the accident, and I was praised by the EMTs for wearing my helmet. (Duh, I'm not an idiot.) But in hindsight, with all the mental damage, the destruction of my riding confidence, the scrabbling fear that now lives inside me about what might have been, it sure feels like I hit my head.

My physical wounds healed quickly. I hadn't broken anything and after a few days of an air cast, and a bit longer to walk normally again I was good to go. Even so, it seemed that however much I tried I could not seem to relay that information to my brain. It felt like I had planted a seed, a seed that was growing and overtaking my mental confidence. It wasn't the accident that was terrifying, it was how the accident happened. I had no control. I thought I was going to ride by that car safely and continue to my house, to my life, but all that was interrupted, shattered, when I was hit.

Now I have to live with that knowledge, the macabre knowledge that even if you take every precaution, bad things can still happen on the bike, and boy does my brain love finding those things and dancing them in front of me.

For the first few months I was an absolute mess on a bike. I couldn't go over 15mph down a hill without having a panic attack. What if if a car turns out of that road? Hell, what if a car suddenly decides to come out of the woods? To my damaged psyche anything was suddenly possible. My brain probably could have told me that big foot was going to walk out from behind that stone wall while I was descending and trip me and I would have believed it, and been afraid of it.

It could happen!

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Being afraid of the what if is terrible.

It got so bad I even called a sports psychologist. He wasn't much good because DAMN they are expensive! Eventually however my brain started to process the trauma. Descending got easier, and squelching down the fear that something was going to pop out of the side of the road and crash me got more manageable. Things went back to normal, almost.

I still have problems descending. That seed of fear still lives inside of me, ready to grow strong if I water it. Every time I have to do a fast descent I have to battle with myself internally. I cannot let this fear win, this panic. Sometimes it does, and as my friends have seen it's not good when it does. Sometimes the panic gets the best of me and I have to pull over and turn into a hyperventilating mess on the side of the road, but this is not frequent anymore, thankfully.

But I can control it, and even though it's been three years, it still gets better if I work at it. My confidence is still coming back, in bits and pieces. That feeling of wheee going downhill is coming back, so for those that have been hit, it does get better, the fear does go away. 

The driver who hit me never apologized, never said he was sorry, all I ever heard him say was, "I didn't see her."

So be careful out there, and seriously don't drive a car in front of me when I'm going downhill.