ACCOZZAGLIA

Some people sort of know about this already, but there hasn’t been a chance until now for me to document it here, or to really tell people whose email addresses I didn’t have with me on my mobile phone.

So I just returned home Friday after being hospitalized for nine days. On the Wednesday before last, I was riding my bike to school and was about 15 blocks or so away from McGill when I was hit by a car. It resulted in two broken ribs, each in two places, and a punctured lung which collapsed. The car was fairly small, which might be one reason why I wasn’t severely injured in other ways. Also, there really wasn’t enough time for me to react beyond thinking, “I’m about to be hit,” so I didn’t have time to tense up my body. Doing so may have resulted in other internal injuries.

Throughout, I remained conscious. I remember the moment of impact and feeling it, but between then and hitting the ground, I’m a little less clear. I remember trying to pull myself up and having had the wind knocked out of me, and then once my diaphragm relaxed did I feel this sharp stabbing pain between my sternum and right breast. I knew I was in bad shape, but was still thinking, “Oh, this will set me back about thirty minutes from getting to class.” Then the situation settled into my mind that I was in much worse shape than that. I really couldn’t move. The paramedics arrived to assure that I wouldn’t move, for fear that I sustained head, spinal, or pelvic injuries. They placed me on one of those rigid boards and secured my neck in a brace. Then they put me on oxygen and brought me to Montréal General Hospital. It turns out they listed me in “critical, but stable” condition, per the newspaper report.

In hospital, they ran a battery of X-rays while I was in triage, then they ran a CT scan to determine whether I sustained head or pelvic injuries. Then they found that blood and air was accumulating between lung and rib cage, leading them to basically tap me like a maple tree to clear the area and make room for my collapsed lung to begin expanding. They half-anaesthetized me, both locally and by using a combination of morphine (and something else which, in their words, help you not remember being doped up — which was hardly the case). It hurt quite badly, even with my high tolerance for pain. They were surprised, though, that I never screamed. That tap drained for the next eight days into this device that measured amount of fluid collected and showed whether I still had a hole in my lungs. That part sucked.

People did come to visit, both from school (classmates, teaching assistants, and administrator alike), from Toronto (my friend Emma was Toronto ambassador), and even my father flew in from Houston (going well out of his way to start showing that he is actually my father). He even volunteered to buy and assemble a POÄNG chair and foot stool from IKEA to help me sleep, since I can’t really lie down flat (at first, because I couldn’t breathe, and since, because of the pain). Sneezing, as I learnt yesterday, is excruciating and scary, as it feels like I’m re-damaging internal tissue.

Beyond the chest, there were lacerations down my thigh, bruised elbow and knee at the bone level (enough for them to warrant x-rays) and scrapes pretty much scattered elsewhere, including my face. My glasses were shattered at impact, leaving me blind throughout my stay at hospital. On my first day out of hospital, my classmate friend accompanied me to a nearby optometrist for an emergency eye exam. So for now, I’m using contact lenses. I have another appointment at hospital in about two weeks to go through another series of x-rays and to clear me for doing things such as school.

I was wearing my helmet, my bright, 1-watt LED strobe headlight was on, and my messenger bag contained my laptop, film camera, and lunch in rubbermaid container (our cohort were scheduled for a walking tour of the Outremont neighbourhood later that morning, hence the camera and lunch). The camera, a Nikon F4, was unharmed (this is not considered unusual when it comes to the F4), while the six-week-old laptop, contained inside a Crumpler School Hymn sleeve, was visibly damaged, though astonishingly it remains functional. It being one of the new aluminium unibody models, the case is now warped, and dents on the reverse of the LED-backlit screen are pressing hard into the liquid crystals, manifest as screen distortion. The underside plate is badly bent in one corner, and the CD slot is unable to take a disc. It doesn’t close flush anymore, but again, it’s still functional. Nevertheless, I guess this is testament to the milled industrial design that the damn thing is durable enough to withstand being hit by a car. Unfortunately, I also learned that replacing the unibody case will cost well more than what the still-new computer is worth. I sorta want to send it to Apple and say, “Here’s proof that the new design approach a whole lot more rugged,” hoping they might say, “Hey, can we use this in future marketing?” One might hope.

I had been riding in the bike lane on a one-way street, which was on a “southward”, downward grade (Rue Saint-Urbain). I use scare quotes because in Montréal, directionals are a relative concept: “south” in this case was actually about 57 degrees canted towards the east. The sun was brightly shining in my face, but just at enough of an angle that tall buildings along the street could cast their shadows onto the road. As I made my way down from Avenue des Pins, there were cyclists both behind and in front of me. I’d passed a slow-moving cyclist just south of des Pins, but really wasn’t moving as fast as others. I don’t remember any cars on Saint-Urbain that were stopped at the coming intersection. I also remember seeing a green light, not a red light, which would have stood out from my perspective (the traffic light was in the shadow of a tall building, not the sunlight). The newspaper reported that, according to police (which have still yet to interview me), I ran a red light (they also reported that I was in my twenties). I simply don’t remember this, as here, I have found that running red lights come at your own peril: people drive fast, and blind spots are many. Running a red light is basically suicide. It’s also no surprise that drivers cannot make right turns on a red light anywhere on the island.

As I do with pretty much whatever intersection, I scope out things before arriving. As with Saint-Urbain, the cross-street, Rue Prince-Arthur, has a one-way bike lane moving with the direction of motorized traffic. At this intersection, there were no buildings obstructing my view of the cross-street (which would be the “northwest” corner of the intersection). There were, however, wall-to-wall cars parked along both sides of Prince-Arthur, all of it in the shadow, which is possibly why I didn’t see any movement until I was already out into the intersection and beyond the “wall”. At that point, I saw a small, white Nissan Versa coming right at me and moving at, I’m guessing, about 30km/h. I was moving at about 20km/h. I at least was able to determine the make of car before being hit, but I’m not totally sure whether the driver was male or female — I’m thinking male. In all, there was maybe about one second to gauge all this imminent disaster information before being hit. The low height of the Versa may have stayed underneath that parked wall, keeping me from being alerted that there was pending motion coming at me from the side.

As far as the future goes, it’s probable that I won’t be riding again until next spring or summer. People from university found my locked bike at the intersection three days later and, with my keys in tow, brought it to school. I doubt I’ll be riding it again, despite being told that it looks relatively unscathed. It may take months to completely heal, and the pain will be persistent to some degree, I’m guessing, for the next few weeks. Energy levels are weird: as I was writing this entry, I fell asleep for about two hours without much advance warning.

As dangerous as Toronto cycling can be, I almost feel like I can manage it better there because of its predictability. Around here, despite so many bike lanes and traffic flow modes, I’ve found myself continually more nervous about the unknown. Even before being hit, I was thinking that winter riding here would be off-limits due to the slopes, crazy speeds by drivers, and reading horror stories about municipal snow ploughs and maimed victims year after year.