phones, fears and facts
This is the third in a series of posts about a single vehicle motorcycle collision I had in July 2024. The first post is here and the second one is here. Some of the names of folks in the story have been changed.
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We made a couple of stops on the way back to Almonte, one in Perth at the grocery store for a bag of ice and something to drink and another at the pharmacy in Almonte. Judith got out and did the errands on both occasions while I waited in the car.
We got to her place at about 4:30 pm and she fed me homemade Hungarian mushroom soup. Judith is an amazing cook who loves to host dinner parties and always seems to have stacks of leftovers on hand. When she drove me home later, I was carrying a ‘doggy bag’ of roasted pepper hummus as well as generous portions of her chicken stroganoff and potato salad. I have a small appetite and I would live on this care package for the next week.
I didn’t want to be alone at home without a phone. Judith called James for me and I asked him if he would stay with me. He had a meeting to attend in Ottawa, he said, but he would meet us at my place afterward at about 9:30 pm. He slept – or rather didn’t sleep – in the spare bedroom down the hall, the one I rent out occasionally through Airbnb.
He checked on me every couple of hours throughout the night. Walked down the hall and stopped outside my open door.
“Susan?”
“Yeah.”
“You okay?
“Yeah.”
“You need anything?”
“No. Thanks.”
“Call if you need anything.”
“Okay, I will. Thanks.”
That’s my recollection of how the night went. James remembers it differently.
“I checked on you every hour or two and you told me to leave you alone.” He laughs when I ask him what he recalls.
“I did not!”
“Yes you did. To be fair, it was only once, but yeah. ‘Susan,’ I said, and then you said: ‘Leave me alone.’” He chuckles again. “I could tell you were out of it from the drugs. You weren’t awake, but since you spoke, I knew you were okay. So, I did what you asked and left you alone and went back to watching garbage on YouTube. Then I checked again in an hour. You were asleep.”
These divergent accounts are hardly surprising. James and I disagree on just about everything. Aside from our passion for motorcycle riding, we have virtually nothing in common. Except maybe that we’re both stubborn survivors and borderline outliers. Other than that, we’re ‘like chalk and cheese’ as the Brits say.
But that’s a story for another day.
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Contrary to what James believed, I didn’t sleep much. Not because he woke me up, but because every little movement caused a sharp stab of pain somewhere in my back or neck. Rolling over was excruciating. I couldn’t breathe properly (bruised ribs). The Tramadol the emerge doc had prescribed softened the sharp edges, but not enough to allow me to drift off for more than a few minutes at a time.
Tramadol is in a class of medications called opiate (narcotic) analgesics. It has a scary rap sheet that includes words such as ‘serious side effects,’ ‘death,’ ‘should not be used,’ and the like. I was to take it every four to six hours ‘as needed’ and I had several days’ worth. It didn’t help much except to knock me out. When I woke up, I was still in pain, but groggier. I also took Tylenol and Advil and tried alternating ice and heat during the first week. All with limited success.
The morning after the collision, I got up with difficulty at about 8:30 am, shuffled into the living room and lowered myself onto the sofa – OUCH! James joined me. He sat in one of the wing-backed chairs on the other side of the small room. We talked for a bit – mostly I wanted to know what he thought I could have done differently when things had gone awry the day before. I had been replaying the event over and over in my head without arriving at a satisfactory conclusion.
“Would you go and take a look at the crash site for me, James?” I asked him. “Not today in the rain, of course. But maybe tomorrow? Maybe you’ll see some clues as to what happened.”
“Sure. But you know I’m gonna’ tell you the truth, right?”
“Well, yeah. That’s the whole point.”
No question I would get the straight goods from James. He calls a spade a spade as they say. He’s long on opinions and short on diplomacy. (I expect to hear laughter when his friends read that understatement.)
“Okay. I’ll look for your phone too.”
“Thanks.”
There was a knock on the front door. It was Judith bringing me a beaver tail – yum. Shift change. James went home to get some sleep. He came back later with a prepaid SIM card and one of his old androids so I could be connected. Funny not funny how we’ve become so dependent on cell phones.
My new friend Jenn rode her beautiful Valkyrie an hour and half to stay with me that night. When she arrived, James left again. Another shift change. Jenn did the dishes and then took my car to the grocery store to get me some ginger ale because the Tramadol made me queasy. She had to get a passerby to push the car out of her parking spot because she couldn’t find the stick shift reverse. I couldn’t either when I first got the car – it’s tricky.
The look of my left arm made me almost as queasy as the drugs. It was getting blacker and bluer and was tinged in places with that sickly shade of mustard yellow. Blech. It still didn’t hurt much though. Meanwhile, the back pain was getting worse, not better and my left ankle, which I sprained at the end of May on an early morning walk, seemed to have fixed itself all of a sudden. (Not, as it turns out.)
Jenn left around 9:30 am on Day 3 (Thursday); James turned her bike around in the driveway before he came in so she wouldn’t have to back down the incline into the street. He’s thoughtful about such things.
“I’m afraid I’m going to be afraid to ride again,” I said to him once he was inside. I was on the sofa with a microwaved grain bag tucked into the small of my back, he was in the wingback chair as usual. He winced every now and again when his knee acted up.
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The Lally Road incident was unlike the other two collisions I had experienced. The first occurred on November 4, 2021, a little over eight weeks after I started riding. It too was a single vehicle collision – TheFox and me and a curb (as opposed to a ditch). It resulted in a broken wrist, a broken and dislocated thumb and bruised ribs. It was one hundred per cent rider error. And yet, all I thought about for the entire winter was riding again. I couldn’t wait to get back in the saddle.
The second collision, with a small SUV in August 2022, could have been far more serious. It was the fault of the driver who cut a corner on a left-hand turn and didn’t see me in the sun’s glare. We side-swiped each other. No injuries or ambulance that time around. I got back on TheFox without a second thought and rode her home immediately afterward.
This episode was different somehow.
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James set out for the Lally Road crash site at around 11 am. Ninety minutes later, I got a notification on the old android he had loaned me. It was a pic of my phone, my Lexin communicator, and what looked to me like a reflector.
“I found your phone :)” The accompanying message read. “Not sure if it’s working. Battery’s probably dead. It got rained on, so… anyway, I’ve got it. And the Lexin. And I have your helmet light too.”
I have a Brake Free warning light that fits into a bracket at the back of my helmet; it flashes red as I ride and gets brighter when I decelerate. It runs on rechargeable batteries and is activated by changes in motion. Along with my white helmet, it makes me more visible to drivers or riders behind me. It had detached sometime during the slide and tumble.
Later, Jamed sent me pics of TheFox from Oakes Towing in Perth; Police Constable P. had told me where she had been taken and I had given James the address.
“Probably a write-off.” He messaged. I asked for a list of the damages.
“Headlight knocked out bent handle bars gas tank dented one missing mirror speedometer glass broken crash bar bent and pushed back rear fender dented broken tail light rear frame bent doesn’t start.”
The total loss would be confirmed by the insurance company ten days later. The cost of parts and labour exceeded the original price of the bike when I bought it brand new in August 2021.
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“You didn’t have a chance,” James said as soon as he walked through the door around 4 pm-ish. “There was absolutely nothing you could have done to change the outcome. The gravel was in the middle of the lane and the curve had a challenging decline in it.”
“I went at the same time of day as you did on purpose, so the conditions would be similar,” he continued. “And guess what? I almost went down too – on the corner before the one you crashed at. Why? Because I didn’t see the gravel either – even though I was looking for it.”
“But why not? Why didn’t we see it?” My problem-solving brain was fully engaged.
“Probably because the sun is directly overhead at noon, which means there are no shadows. And the colour of the gravel on that particular road is almost the same as the road itself. It’s kinda’ white. So is the chip-and-seal surface. White on white with no shadows is pretty much impossible to see.”
“And there’s nothing I could have done to avert the ditch once I hit the gravel?”
“Nothing.”
But something niggled at me. The puzzle of how it all happened wasn’t resolved in my head. The gravel was in the middle of the lane. That didn’t fit with going wide, which had been my first guess.
I plugged the phone in. The outline of a battery with the thinnest of red slivers at one end appeared on the screen. Holy cow, it’s working!
By the time the phone was fully charged the following day, I had everything figured out.
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Stay tuned for part four and follow my FB page here.
© 2024 Susan Macaulay. I invite you to share my poetry and posts widely, but please do not reprint, reblog or copy and paste them in their entirety without my permission. Thank you.
