I was biking home when you barreled into me with your car and left me to die
By Andrew J. Bernstein
From OutsideOnline.com
Here’s what you did when you hit me with your van. And, yes, I understand that it almost certainly wasn’t you who hit me, but since what happened to me was caused by an unidentified assailant who was likely driving while either distracted, drunk, high, using a phone, speeding, or just angry that there was a cyclist on the road, and as you have probably driven in one or more of those states, this is about you and what you did to me—and what you could do to another cyclist.
You plowed into me from behind when I was riding on a nearly empty road. Your speed was so fast relative to mine that I was guaranteed severe injury, despite my safety tokens: a helmet, a blinky light, and a defensive posture on the right edge of the wide shoulder. Your van hit me with such violence that pieces of your vehicle and mine scattered along the grassy embankment. The impact flung my body through the air, and I landed at the bottom of a roadside ditch.
The blunt impact sent force vectors through my body, snapping my right collarbone and exploding my left shoulder. It broke every single one of my ribs. And my sternum. It collapsed both of my lungs. You shattered my left ankle, broke my tibia and fibula, and snapped my femur. You crushed my pelvis and caused internal bleeding so severe that my blood pressure didn’t stabilize for days, even after emergency surgery and pint after pint of transfused blood. You fracturedvertebrae in my neck and back and damaged my spinal cord, paralyzing my left leg and compromising my bladder and bowel function.
That would have been enough, lifetimes’ worth of trauma to pass to an unsuspecting 34-year-old man heading home to spend the evening with his fiancée after an afternoon of training for the season’s last big bike race.
But you’re a special kind of cruel, so you drove away.
You left me to die.
Read the rest of the full article here
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