Always Wear Your Helmet when biking

Always Wear Your Helmet when biking

This dirt on my helmet corresponds the the area of my face and scalp that would have been scraped away had I not been wearing the helmet.

Riding my bike out towards Dexter I had a bit of an accident. I was pedalling along at about 21 mph when I thought that my saddle felt loose, maybe it might have wiggled. In the split second that I had decided to pull over and check it out I heard a pop and then I was on the ground sliding through gravel on the side of the road. The bolt holding my saddle to the post broken and I almost instantly fell to the right, sliding through the gravel with my right knee, elbow, and helmet. I never even had time to get out of my pedal clips, it was all so very fast.

A kind man driving a big black Lincoln pulled over, gave me the towel off of his golf bag for my bleeding arm, and guided limping me and my equally limping bike off to a nice nuetral parking lot. He let me call home, and Smart was home. He drove out and SAG'ed me home.

I was still in shock in this picture. As I started to clean up I realized that my wounds were much too deep and disgusting to deal with. Guthaus dropped me off at the U of M emergency room where I waited in the lobby for 2.5 hours and spent even more time back in the ER as the nurse and doctor took turns scraping away all the damaged flesh with a stiff brush. The nurse was pretty cool, he was really into mountain biking and we talked for a bit. The doctor was nice, but he seemed to be having too much scrubbing off my elbow.

The pain of the procedure was very strange. The scrubbed areas were locally numbed, but I still felt strange dull tugs and scrapes from the wounds. I also felt strange and rather strong pains from areas not directly adjacent to the wounds. I was really out of it for the whole ordeal so it's hard to describe, but it was defintely an experience.

I'm not going to necessarily subject you to pictures of the wounds, but if you're curious, click away. The pictures are too blurry to be really gross, but just look and the dark spots and realize that there's almost no skin there. knee elbow