Living Dangerously

In more than two years of riding my road bike I have only had one major accident. Riding my mountain bike, on the other hand, seems to result in at least one wreck per week. Usually these aren't very bad; scrapes, bruises... normal stuff. But yesterday I managed to raise the bar.

I was riding solo on my lunch ride when I decided to tackle a short steep hill that I usually ride around. It's the sort of hill that you could never just ride up, but if you get enough momentum and then switch through your gears fast enough you can manage to get up without stopping. What makes the hill particularly difficult is that you can't ride straight up it. There is a slight S-curve that you need to navigate as you are riding. Also, the hill drops off on one side to pit several feet down filled with broken fragments of concrete slab.

Well, I didn't get enough momentum going into the hill and ended up about halfway up before I had trouble pedaling. The hill was steep enough that as I came to a stop I started to feel myself going over backwards. I went to put my feet down to catch myself but there was nowhere for them to go because of the drop off. Before I knew it I was upside down with my body slamming into the concrete slabs.

I can honestly say that my helmet saved my life yesterday. My lower back took the brunt of the fall, but shortly after my back hit my head (or rather my helmet) came slamming down as well. I was really lucky that I managed to not get impaled by the several pieces of rebar that were sticking out of the concrete slabs.

Fortunately, I was able to pick myself up and walk away. I had blood dripping down my leg and my back hurt like hell but at least it didn't feel like anything was broken.

Now here comes the stupid part... I was riding circles in the parking lot beneath the Slate Canyon trailhead trying to decide whether or not I should continue riding or just head back to work and I'll bet that you can't guess which I chose. Yep, with my back hurting so bad that it was painful to walk, I decided to finish my workout and continue the climb up Slate Canyon. Silly me :)

I actually wasn't too concerned about the injury until I got back to work. It was starting to swell really bad. By 3 in the afternoon, a couple of hours after the incident, I felt like I had a basketball embedded in my back. I showed my boss and he insisted that I go to a doctor to have it looked at.

On top of the pain, I was starting to get faint. This started at work but continued to get worse through my doctor visit. I actually blacked out at one point as I was talking to the doctor and they had to wheel me around in a wheelchair as I was beginning to doubt that I could walk without passing out and falling over.

The only thing that I learned from the doctor was that I had a massive hematoma in my back. They did some blood work to make sure that I wasn't losing too much blood to internal bleeding and then checked my urine to make sure that I hadn't damaged my kidneys in the fall. Both checked out OK. There wasn't a whole lot left to do other than wait for the pain to subside and the swelling to go down.

Here is a picture of my hematoma. It's kind of embarrassing because it looks like I just have a massive love handle.


It turns out that my body was not the only thing to get injured. When I mountain bike, I carry along my iPhone in my camel back. After the accident, the iPhone was still playing music, so I didn't suspect any damage. But when I got back to work and pulled it out of my pack, this is what I saw:


Do you think that this will be covered by the warranty? It makes me so sad that I want to cry :(