Harley Rider Down - The Accident
As some of you may know. I am in the hospital. I will be in the hospital for quite a while. Here’s the story.
Saturday morning, I was riding my bike to work. At approximately 9:50 am, I was coming around a curve in the road. (Keep in mind that what follows happened in the space of about one second) For some reason, perhaps sand or gravel on the road, my back tire lost it’s grip on the road and I began to slide toward the side of the road. I saw that I was sliding toward a telephone pole. My plan was to dump the bike and let it go its way while I went mine. However, just as I started to let go of the handle bars and abandon the bike, my rear tire caught its grip on the road and high-sided me (stood my bike up) right into the concrete telephone pole.
The exact spot of the accident can be seen at 3:35 on this video (where, ironically, I am talking about the inability of harleys to corner very deeply). I hit the telephone pole that is just to the right of the center of the screen at the 3:35 mark.
As I hit the pole, I ducked my head and was looking at my gas tank and leg as my leg got sandwiched between the tank and the pole. I saw my leg break and flop around as I went spinning off the bike. I rolled about 10 meters further up the street, with my bike tumbling close behind me.
I came to a rest on my left side. My right glove was off (I still don’t know how or why) and I was bleeding slightly from my middle knuckle. My right leg was numb and bent inward at the thigh at a particularly odd angle. The toes on my right foot hurt. I was staring at my bike…and the bits and pieces of it laying around the road.
I yelled at the top of my voice. Not so much out of pain as out of helplessness and the need to get to a hospital. I yelled for help. No one responded for several long seconds, during which I saw several cars drive past me. I did see one person in a truck looking at me and talking on their mobile phone. I could feel people standing and looking at me from the bus stop behind me.
I yelled again for someone to help me and for someone to call 119, the emergency services number. I would guess that I laid there a full minute before someone actually came to me. It was some old woman telling me that 119 had been called and were coming. A few seconds later, two Mormon Church missionaries came and started to talk to me. They said that they had heard the accident from their apartment and had run down to help. They helped me get my helmet off and to get my bike off the road.
The police arrived a couple of minutes later. They were asking my name, what happened, was I OK, things like that. They asked what I planned to do with the motorcycle and whether someone would come to pick it up. I thought that was a stupid question to ask at that point in time and I told them so. They started to lecture me about how I just couldn’t leave it there on the side of the road. To shut them up, I told them that I would have someone come and pick it up AFTER I got to the hospital.
While waiting for the ambulance to get there, I made a few phone calls on my mobile phone to let people know what happened.
The ambulance arrived about 15 minutes after the accident. Several guys rolled me over onto the gurney and wheeled me over to the ambulance van. After stuffing me inside, they asked what hospital I wanted to go to. I told them I didn’t care and that they should just get me to a good, close one. They said that I had to decide, so I told them to take me to one of the bigger hospitals near the accident site.
After a bumpy ride with lots of corners, we arrived at the hospital. They wheeled me in to the emergency room where I waited for an hour or so. Eventually, they took me for some x-rays. In the x-ray room, they cut my pants off and had to remove my boots. As they pulled the boot off of my swollen right foot, my toes felt really bad. I could feel the blood sticking my socks to my toes and to the top of my boot. Eventually, they got the boot off and everyone in the room had very unpleasant looks on their faces as they looked at my toes. I asked what was going on? One of the missionaries that had come with me said, “Dude, your toes are shredded.” There was too much blood for them to say more than that. I had to move on and off the x-ray table to take the x-rays. That was unpleasant.
The doctor decided that I would have to have surgery to repair my leg. He explained that usually, they would usually delay surgery for a couple to put me in traction and stretch out the leg before going in to work on the bone. However, because the damage to my toes required immediate surgery, they would do my leg surgery at that time. They scheduled surgery for 2:00 pm that day.
As I awaited surgery, my Harley Davidson repairman friend came from Changwon (about an hour from me) to pick up the bike and take it back to his shop for repairs.
At the scheduled time, I went into surgery. Just as they gassed me into unconsciousness, I heard the doctors grumbling about how difficult it was going to be to operate on my leg.
I woke up in my darkened room around 8:00 pm. I was told that the surgery had taken about three hours. The doctor told me that everything went well, but it had taken four large nurses to pull my leg far enough and straight enough to set it properly. The doctor told me that everything was clean and should heal very nicely. When asked about my toes, he told me that there has been some damage to the bottom of the second toe on my right foot and extensive damage to the third toe. He explained that they cut off “the end” of my third toe (i’m still not sure what that mean… it just looks like a bandaged mess right now) and used the skin to repair my second toe.
They told me to sleep and they would talk more in the morning. I quickly complied.
After waking up Sunday morning, I noticed that I had a urinary catheter tube, which was extremely uncomfortable…and EXTREMELY painful when in came out Tuesday afternoon.
My brother came down from Seoul to help me out for a couple of weeks.
The doctor came in Sunday afternoon to explain the situation. He showed me the x-ray. It was NOT a clean break. My thigh bone had shattered into several pieces and they had spent a lot of time picking bone fragments out of my thigh muscles. They installed a titanium rod running from my hip to my knee and secured it to the bone with eleven large screws. The also used a steel band around the bone to hold all of the bone fragments in place.
He explained that I could probably use crutches after one week. I would have to stay in the hospital for three to four weeks. It would be at least five weeks before I could put any weight on my leg. I would use a walker for three to four weeks. The splint would stay on for about 8 weeks. And I would be able to walk freely after about three months. Motorcycle riding would take about four months.
As for the bike… I don’t have all of the details yet. But the latest repair quote was about $6,700.