Hit by a Runaway Trailer A second or two isn't much time to think about anything, let alone your immediate fate. Yet that's about all the time I had when I was struck from behind while cycling. Caught without warning, the sudden jarring surprised me. My mind raced as I tried to determine what happened. A truck had just passed me – it was still in view – so I knew it wasn't a vehicle that had hit me; the thing had been too close behind the truck. Besides, why would a car be driving on the shoulder where I was cycling? I felt only a bump, so I didn't think it was serious. I was still on my bike and still controlling it, or so I thought. And I felt reassured because even if I were to fall I was wearing a helmet. I thought I was going to be okay. Incredibly, all this must have passed through my mind in a split second, the time it took the speeding object to shatter my rear wheel before hitting my bike frame. For me time had slowed, an altered perception so common in life-or-death situations that it has a name: tachypsychia. What I thought was slow, careful deliberation occurred in an instant. When I felt the massive impact of the thing smashing into my bike frame, I changed my assessment: “I'm dead." The accident happened in the summer of 1986 when I moved to Ontario to look for work. I was staying with a high school buddy in Beamsville, a town situated between Niagara Falls and Hamilton. Here the back roads provided great cycling. Running through farmland, they were mostly devoid of traffic. Today should have been a typical ride but something had gone terribly wrong. I was thrown from my bike, but I was unaware of hitting the ground. I didn't feel my collarbone snap into three pieces or my ankle break and ligaments tear. I didn't know that my left foot had become caught in the bike frame and that I was being dragged along the ditch next to the road. In fact, I felt nothing at all, like what an astronaut must experience when he's floating in space. It was quiet, black and calm. I felt no fear. It happened too fast to think about being afraid, but I thought these were my last seconds on earth. Suddenly everything came to a halt and I found myself lying on my back partly underneath a heavy, wooden trailer, the kind used for hauling dirt. My feet faced the front of the trailer. One foot was tangled in the bike frame and my bike was caught in the trailer hitch. Behind my head was one of the big wheels of the trailer. If I hadn't been dragged, the trailer would have run over my head. All motion ended so abruptly that it was eerie. I lay thinking that it can't be over, but nothing happened and I was thankful to be alive. I opened my eyes to find I wasn't mutilated, no blood or twisted limbs. Apart from minor cuts and scrapes, I appeared unscathed. Yet I had to deal with something intangible: shock. I wasn't afraid, I wasn't in pain, I was in shock. So I screamed and kept on screaming. Even when someone came up to me, I pushed him away and continued screaming. I yelled until my shock was spent and I calmed down. Then I became aware of a pain in my left shoulder and left ankle. I also heard a guy, a farmer, cursing about his trailer breaking loose on him. Poor guy.
People soon began to arrive at the scene. Someone told me an ambulance was on the way. Another threw a blanket on me. Another cautioned me to remain still. A police officer came up to me and asked me what happened. I smiled wryly and waved my good arm at the trailer. "I was introduced to this trailer," I told him. He chuckled. The ambulance was quick. The attendants came over and after appraising the situation, they helped me remove my cycling jersey (they wanted to cut it off but I liked that jersey) and put my arm in a sling. I thought it would be less painful if I got up unattended, so I carefully stood up and laid down on the stretcher. They wheeled me to the ambulance and lifted me inside. I had to smile at what happened next. While backing up, the ambulance hit a telephone pole! Then we were on our way to Hotel Dieu, a hospital in St. Catherines. At the hospital, they rolled me into emergency and sat me in a wheelchair while I waited to get x-rayed. Despite my thirst, I was refused water in case I had internal injuries. I took advantage of the wait to call home to say I would be late for supper. An hour and a half after arriving they wheeled me to the x-ray department and x-rayed my left collarbone. But I was worried about my left ankle. When I arrived at the hospital I couldn't convince the ambulance attendants that there was something wrong with it. To ease my discomfort, I insisted they remove my cycling shoe. They looked at one another, shrugged as if I was crazy, but obliged. Now I was having trouble persuading the x-ray technician to look at my ankle. I pointed to my ankle and demanded, "X-ray it!" She reluctantly gave in, but as she positioned my lower leg she noticed something was indeed wrong. Afterwards, while they were wheeling me back to emergency, I heard a crash outside the hospital. I learned later that someone had been driving by the hospital and noticed a police car parked in front. Distracted by the car, the driver didn't notice the vehicle ahead brake for a red light and he crashed into it. Back in emergency, I found a cop waiting for me, the same cop that was at the scene of my accident. He was also the same one who parked his cruiser out front, the cruiser that distracted the luckless driver who had crashed outside the hospital. The officer gave me the name of the farmer who had been pulling the trailer. The farmer, he told me, was charged with failing to secure his trailer properly; a safety chain would have prevented the accident. He added that it was a freak accident. Had the trailer broken free one second sooner or later, I would have been spared. Nearly four hours after arriving at the hospital I was told the results of my x-rays. I had a broken collar bone and a broken ankle. A nurse gave me a glass of water and a shot of Demerol to ease the pain. A doctor, an orthopedist, put me in a shoulder harness – a device that pulled both shoulders back – to treat my broken collar bone. He set my leg in a cast. But I wouldn't be going home soon. The next day they had me up and around in a wheelchair. They insisted that exercise was important. However, since I couldn't use my left arm, I could only wheel around in circles. A few days later, I felt better and began using my left arm to a limited extent. After two weeks in the hospital, I appeared to be doing well and looked forward to being released. Instead, I received bad news. The broken bone in my lower leg, the fibula, wasn't mending. The ligaments were torn and weren't able to hold it in place. I had to undergo surgery. If I didn't have surgery, the ends of the bone would set slightly off position and I would develop arthritis later. Surgery was the worst part of my stay at Hotel Dieu. My cast was removed and I was sedated. Before falling asleep, the surgeon demonstrated the need for surgery. He repeatedly pressed and released the broken end of my fibula, and each time the bone sprang back. Soon after this demonstration I fell asleep and missed the operation. They made an incision along the outside of my ankle. After exposing the bone, they inserted a stainless steel screw at an angle to hold the ends of the bone together. Next they screwed a three-inch, stainless steel plate over the break, held with six screws. After stitching the incision they wrapped my lower leg in a soft cast. I would wear this for a week until the swelling went down enough for them to apply a plaster cast. The operation lasted an hour and a half.
For the next two days, I received Demerol shots every four hours to kill the pain. But the drug made me groggy and I soon refused to take it. Instead I took Tylenol 3. My ankle hurt but at least I was alert. Three weeks after I was admitted to the hospital, I was released. Six weeks after my release, my cast was removed and I stopped wearing the shoulder harness, although I still needed crutches to get around for the next few weeks. However, I was anxious to get back into shape so while still using crutches, I started cycling, albeit cycling with my one good leg. Later I went for x-rays and learned that my ankle was healing nicely, the bones perfectly aligned and the break line was gone. A year after the accident, after I had returned to Alberta, I underwent surgery to remove the hardware from my leg. I sued the driver's insurance company and after lawyer's fees, I collected $18,000 ($35,000 today). I continued road biking avidly and was hit a few more times by cars, but the collision with a runaway trailer remains my worst accident. |
