This is old news for most of you that read this blog, but I thought I would write this down for posterity’s sake. Around the end of June I was in a crazy bike accident. I was biking home from school at a little after 5 o’clock when a lady in a parked car opened her driver side door right in front of me. I had no time to react — I couldn’t swerve, or hit my breaks, or even blink. I instantly slammed into the inside of the door. I was going pretty fast (not quite full-steam, but almost) and the force of the impact bent the front fork of my bike and bent the door of the car back until it almost touched the hood of the car. As my bike hit the door, I flipped backward through the window of the door. The glass shattered as I crashed through it and I landed on my head on the other side. Miraculously, I was relatively unscathed. I was bleeding quite a bit, though, since a lot of the glass pieces from the window were shoved into my forearm as I skidded on the road.

The accident happened on Liberty street right in front of LAB coffee shop. A couple of workers from the coffee shop came out to see if I was okay. They brought me some ice water and a dish rag to help me stop the bleeding. Someone else brought out a first aid kit and got me the tweezers so I could pick the biggest chunks of glass out of my arm. While we waited for the police to show up, I had a few bystanders come and tell me that they couldn’t believe what they had seen. “That was awesome,” they said, “it looked like something right out of a movie!” It may look cool in movies, but it sure doesn’t feel very good!

When the police arrived, they ticketed the lady in the car for failure to yield to oncoming traffic. I felt bad for her; she was probably in her mid-seventies, and she kept saying, “I just didn’t look. I didn’t even see you there.” She looked even more shook up than I was. The police officer offered to call me an ambulance, but that seemed ridiculous so I declined. A nice girl who had seen everything happen and stayed around to be a witness offered to let me use her iphone to call Kay; she even told me not to worry about getting blood on it. Kay came and picked me up and then I went to an urgent care center to get checked over. They patched me up, gave me a tetanus shot, and sent me on my way.

I included these photos to show off my arm bandages. I healed up nicely, and now all I have left is a few faint scars on my arm. The lady’s insurance even paid for my bike – which I had actually inherited free from our landlord when we moved here – so in the end things worked out well. I feel very blessed; I was definitely watched over on that day. And now I have quite the story to emphasize to Oliver and Abby why we need to wear helmets!