Passes & Canyons Blog

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.

Tags: brain surgery, drunk driver crash

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2025 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Motorcycle Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.