The Injuries

A bike accident? Surely that must be Crowdpleaser involved…

Nope, it’s Crowds. She’s conscious enough to type on IM about how she fell off someone else’s bike, without a helmet, late last night, and fell on her head and left shoulder. Of course, she didn’t go to the hospital; people wanted her to videotape them having sex! She passed out before she even turned the camera on.

She has vomited a few times since and her shoulder really, really hurts.

She’s telling me all this online, 1000 miles away, typing with one hand with a giant headache. Here, let me give you a brief history of bike accidents in my life:

I’ve never been in a bike accident. This isn’t because of luck, it’s because I don’t get in bike accidents.

My close friend/roommate was in a bike accident while he and I were out enjoying the weather. We had some awesome speed down the main street, me in front, when I hear the car door next to me start to open. “I hope he avoids that door,” I think. *CRASH*. The loudest noise I’ve heard in a while.

By the time I get back to him he’s on the ground, not moving, and a woman is hunched over him repeating “Don’t be dead. Don’t be dead. …”. I say, “Hey man, get up, we have to get back and watch some movies.” He doesn’t move. I take his bike out from under him (he had just built the bike—this his its first ride) and report that there’s a scratch or two, but it’s otherwise fine. He starts to move when I tell him his bike is fine (later he told me that it’s the only thing he remembers). An ambulance comes and takes him away; he shows up at the apartment four hours later, dazed, with his smashed-up helmet. “The helmet saved my life,” he reports.

Before this an ex was riding from my apartment to school when she was struck by a large truck (the truck fled the scene). She landed, apparently, head-first against the edge of the curb, splitting her helmet in twain. Despite this, she was okay enough to walk to the nearest hospital, with her bike. The helmet totally saved her life, no doubt.

So, with those experiences behind me, and armed with lots of research about concussions because of those experiences, I did what anyone would do when hearing “I fell off a bike without a helmet and landed on my head”: I demanded (“suggested”) that Crowds go to the hospital.

Oh, and a mild sense of panic, dread, uselessness, and hopelessness set in.

This is because she is a thousand miles away; if she needed someone physically there, I couldn’t be that person. I had to convince her, via IM, to go to the hospital. I did, but it took an hour of messaging. I know that the worst part about the emergency room is the boring wait, alone, injured, unable to do anything. If I were there, convincing her could have been as simple as “hey, let’s go to the ER and hang out there for a bit”.

This panic is also because I cannot at all judge the severity of her injuries. Sure, I’m not a doctor; were I there, I couldn’t determine whether a bone is broken, sprained, bruised, or fine. However, it would still put my mind at ease to be able to see the scrapes, bruises, cuts, and limping instead of guessing at what it must feel like based on “my shoulder really hurts but I can still type with the hand”. She sent a picture of her bruised head, which actually helped, but it still didn’t reduce the panic to a normal level.

And if something bad did happen to her … The last time I saw her was five months prior, and I won’t see her for another month. The anticipation for the upcoming meet-up had been growing between us; it will be the longest meet-up we’ve had (three weeks!) with the most stuff planned (hot air ballooning?!). I’d rather have her alive than dead at any point, but it would be most depressing if something awful happened just before we were to meet.

The happier ending is that she made it to the hospital (hint: “if I came home and said that I had just fallen off my bike, landed on my head, and was vomiting, what would you say?”) and came out with a very mild concussion and a broken collarbone. She’ll never ride a bike again, she claims.

And, Crowds is now awesome at one-handed typing.