Passes & Canyons Blog

The Shoei that saved my head. You can see scrapes that would have been chunks out of my face without it.

I remain to this day a believer that it should be up to the rider to decide whether or not to wear a helmet. That said, I truly believe that anyone who rides without a helmet is a fool. I know I’m not the only one who holds both those beliefs.

My recent crash just emphasizes that second point.

Sure, for many years riding with the OFMC, when it was mostly just John, Bill, and me, we all rode much of the time without helmets. We always carried them because we sometimes were in states where they were required. Plus, if it rains a helmet is a very nice thing to have and in winter it helps keep your head warm.

Even that first helmet was nothing to brag about. It was a used Bieffe that I bought at a yard sale for $25. But I figure it had not been in a crash because it was not scraped the way my Shoei was (above).

But as we all three gradually moved more and more toward wearing them I was the one who held out the longest.

I went 37 years with no crashes. And then I had a crash. A bad one. It was not at all my fault. I was stopped at a red light waiting to make a left turn and a drunk drove straight into me. I went down hard, hard enough that I ultimately needed a bit of brain surgery. Imagine what shape my head and my brain would be in today if I had not had that helmet on.

So now as I’m out and about (Judy still doing all the driving) when I see bikers without helmets I cringe. In so many cases it is Harley riders. I totally get it. I understand the desire to ride without that helmet. And hey, I know it just won’t happen to you. Just like it didn’t happen to me–until it did.

A couple years ago I was at an intersection when I heard the sound of a crash. I turned to see a car stopped in a peculiar angle and a Harley on  the ground. I ran over to help and the rider was bleeding like a stuck pig from his ear, which was half torn off. His lobe was dangling from a slender piece of skin. And they didn’t even hit each other. They both made evasive moves and he went down as he avoided her. But he got hurt pretty badly.

I kind of think it is a situation where you have a lot of people who are just uninformed and have not really taken a hard look at reality. That’s part of why I’ve spent so much time documenting my experience. If you know someone you’d like to persuade to wear a helmet you might direct them to this whole series of posts and once they’ve read about what I’ve gone through ask them if they had ever really considered the potential consequences, in such concrete depiction.

So yeah, for many years I was a fool. A huge fool. But I’ve been a lot of things in my life that I no longer am. Once a fool is not always a fool. At least it doesn’t have to be.

Biker Quote for Today

I started riding to attract women. So far the only women I meet due to riding are orthopedic nurses and they are NOT impressed.

This is a screen shot of part of an email I got from the claims adjuster handling the bills from my crash.

I was at the July RMMRC meeting and we were discussing my recent crash. Tom, who is an attorney, said very authoritatively that if the guy was uninsured then I would be stuck with all the costs, because uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage on your car stays with the car, not with you.

I told him no, he was wrong. I had been told by someone in the emergency room that that sort of coverage goes with the person, not the vehicle. One of the first things I did once I was released from the hospital was to call our agent. He confirmed that the coverage goes with me, not the vehicle, and he urged me to open a claim right away. I did.

The first bill I got was for the ambulance. It was about $1,800. I directed them to Colorado Farm Bureau, giving them the claim number. That was the last I heard of that.

I later got an email from the claims person handling my case. That screen shot above is what she told me about charges they would be covering. Apparently everything else is being covered by Medicare.

It’s important that you understand this situation. As an attorney, Tom has a lot of experience in this sort of thing. But he was wrong. How many thousands of dollars would I have been billed for the ER physician and the ER facility? I know as far as radiology goes, they did three CT scans on me while I was there. We’re talking serious bucks here. All this while suffering the financial loss of my motorcycle and my helmet, about $3,500 worth by my estimate.

If you’ve been following this all along I hope you’re not getting too burned out on hearing about my crash and the aftermath. It has been a real learning experience for me and I’ve been trying to pass what I’ve learned along to you. There’s so much I had no idea of and I suspect most people have no more clue than I did.

So anyway, on Friday I’ll go in for my eighth and, I hope, final CT scan. Then on Tuesday I’ll go in to see what the scan showed and to have these staples removed from my head. Then maybe I’ll be able to turn my attentions to more upbeat topics, such as the new bike I’ll be buying and the new helmet and riding suit that I plan to get. And after that maybe I’ll even be able to start writing about rides I’ve gone on. That’ll sure make me happy.

Biker Quote for Today

Any motorcycle can serve you your whole life if you ride fast enough.

Bill remarked that my doctor ruined my hairdo. John made the obvious comparison to a football.

So I went in to Swedish and they drilled a couple holes in my head to drain the excess fluid that was building up inside my skull and pushing my brain off to the side, where it was not intended to be. Now I’m at home, taking drugs that drain all my energy and leave me laid out on the couch most of each day.

But my latest CT scan looks much better and if the next one, in about 10 days, continues to look better I should be back on the path to normalcy soon. Meanwhile I’m not supposed to drive for three weeks or consume alcohol or exert myself more than just a little. This puts a big load on Judy but as she said, if it had been her I would do it. This is what being married is all about sometimes. I just can’t imagine someone in this condition having no one to care for them.

I had wondered about the surgery. Would they cut two little V-shaped patches and pull the skin back to drill? Apparently not. It makes sense. They seem to have made one long slit and pulled the skin back enough at each end to drill. Then when it was time to seal me up they just used staples. The skin around your skull is custom fitted and snug so imagine trying to get that all back smoothly using needle and thread. Staples make more sense, plus it’s a whole lot easier to push the skin back together with your fingers and then, ka-chunk. And apparently there are not a lot of nerve endings up there because they did it without any anesthesia and it really didn’t hurt much. Who knew?

Biker Quote for Today

Loud pipes are loud pipes.

A rough sketch showing how the CT scans looked initially and a month later.

By the time you read this I will be checked in at Swedish Medical Center to get a couple holes drilled in my head.

The most serious injury I suffered in my encounter on my CB750 with a drunk driver on June 29 was a head injury, causing some bleeding on my brain. In the time since then all my other injuries have made substantial progress toward healing; the brain bleed has gotten worse.

So the docs said we need to operate. This procedure is called a burr-hole for septural drainage. That means they will drill two holes in my skull and insert little tubes to drain away all the excess fluid that has been collecting, and in doing so, pushing my brain to the left and creating increasing pressure. Our brains are extremely delicate organs and the pressure can lead to nasty things such as migraines, seizures, vision issues, and more. We had planned to go this weekend on a family camping excursion but the docs said no, it would not be a good idea for me to be that far away from an emergency room in case things took a bad turn.

It is not clear to me at this point what the docs will do to actually stop the bleeding. Draining is good, but I don’t want to be going back once a month to have the holes reopened and drained again.

Along the way I’ve had the opportunity to make my point about nomenclature that I discussed previously. With all the customary paperwork, I was talking with a woman who was asking me all about my health history. At one point she referred to the crash as a “motorcycle accident.”

No, I stopped her, I object to that characterization of what happened. This was a drunk driving incident that had nothing to do with a motorcycle other than the fact that I was on one. If I had been on a bicycle would you refer to it as a bicycle accident? If I had been on foot would you refer to it as a pedestrian accident? I doubt it. In those cases you would say bicyclist hit by drunk driver, or pedestrian hit by drunk driver. How about motorcyclist hit by drunk driver?

Yeah, I’m a little touchy but I spent my working life as a writer and editor and I care about words, and using the right words.

Anyway, I’ll be in residence at Swedish for a few days following this procedure. Then who knows how I’ll feel and how long it will be before I’m able to get back on the bike again. I know that after heart surgery I was two months off the bikes. I don’t think that’s how this will go. After heart surgery they kept me there in the ICU for a week and it was a month before I was able to walk around the block.

Now here’s a question: how many other people do you know who have had both heart surgery and brain surgery? I figure I must be in a pretty elite group. Do your best not to join me.

Biker Quote for Today

At high speed, objects on the horizon are closer than they appear.

I was sitting right about where that black Nissan is when I was hit.

I got back on my last remaining bike today for the first time since my crash. I never had any hesitation but I had wondered if, when the time came to throw my leg over the seat and fire it up, would I then have any uncertainties?

Nope, not at all. It felt like the most natural thing in the world. It felt good.

So where did I ride? I went right back to the scene of the crash. I’ve gotten some information about how the crash unfolded from the police and the DA’s office but I still don’t really know exactly what happened. I have registered myself to receive notice when the police report is finally available but I’m told that can be months. So I try to piece things together.

One thing that has been mentioned repeatedly is that the driver went over a median before hitting me. That seemed odd because I did not recall there being a median there. Well, there is.

From what the lady at the DA’s office told me, the guy must have been coming off southbound Santa Fe, turning east onto Belleview, and in his drunken stupor he thought the lane I was in was a lane he could use. He may have seen me and tried to veer right but by than had straddled the median so his left front wheel hit the median and threw his car back to the left, with the right front wheel bouncing over the median before he hit me.

There apparently was a witness who stuck around and told the police everything he/she saw. I would very much like to talk to that person.

So anyway, that helps explain why my injuries were not a whole lot worse. Unlike a head-on where both parties are going 60 mph, for an impact speed of 120 mph, I was at a standstill and the other guy, coming off the highway and slowing to make a turn, was perhaps going 20 mph. And he may have already had his foot on the brake. However it all happened, despite my pain and financial loss, and the loss of the very first motorcycle I ever owned, I feel pretty darn lucky.

But I still really want to read that police report.

I have long been a critic of those in the non-motorcycle riding public who treat any crash involving a motorcycle as a “motorcycle crash.” OK, so the crash involved a motorcycle and a car. Why do you not call it a car/motorcycle crash? Calling it a motorcycle crash makes it sound like it was just the biker who did something stupid. When in fact, far too often, the stupid person is the person driving the car.

 EMTs are not the least bit sentimental about clothing. If  you’re wearing it, they’re going to just cut it off of you.

So I was looking through the medical reports related to my recent head-on encounter with a drunk driver and it irked me to see this listing:

Problems
Injury of abdominal wall
Hematoma of subdural space of neuraxis
Laceration of left thumb
Motorcycle accident

Just as an aside, I have no idea what they are referring to as “Injury of abdominal wall.” This was the first I had heard of that. Is that internal? External? Beats me. One place I have not had any pain is in my stomach area. Go figure.

But there it was, fourth item on the list: Motorcycle accident. I can see how a lacerated thumb, bleeding on the brain, and some nebulous injury of the abdominal wall qualifies as a “problem.” It seems a little odd to include motorcycle accident in that particular list. Who knows. Maybe experienced trauma doctors know of a standard set of symptoms that are almost always connected to motorcyclists’ injuries, and this is just shorthand to tip them off.

I mean, when I was taken in for my second or third CT scan I talked with the tech about my thumb, among other things, and she said oh yeah, motorcyclists always seem to end up with injured thumbs and they always say that’s what hurts the most.

Anyway, just as an update, I’m doing much better. That nasty looking thumb I showed the picture of is now almost completely healed, although sometimes when I make some movement I have not been able to identify I get a sharp jolt of real pain shooting up on the outside. And if I try to open a tight jar lid that can hurt, too.

My right knee is now largely pain free but sometimes I do get jolts of pain there, too. And my right side (bruised ribs, I presume) continue to ache.

The other thing that I’m not sure about yet is the subdural hematoma, the brain bleed. They did three CT scans on me while I was in the ER and then said I should have a follow-up done two weeks later. I did, and the following day they called to tell me they wanted another follow-up in another two weeks. And after that they want me to come in and they will show me the scan results and discuss what they’re seeing. I’m not getting all wrought up over it but I do wonder if this means there is some problem that may require further treatment. Worst case scenario: brain surgery. God, I hope not! I’ll know on Thursday.

Biker Quote for Today

Why just drive when you can ride?