Wheels within Wheels

I went on a bicycle ride along the Platte River on Sunday morning with Marion. We rode from Confluence Park down to Littleton. There were some detours – not only was the Platte high with runoff, but there’s some maintenance and development work being done.

Just south of Hampden Avenue, you actually have to take the Bear Creek trail west for a while before cutting back to the Platte River trail on the streets.

The Platte running high has had effects on others besides bicyclists and joggers:

Not to mention the people washed away by flash flooding Monday night.

On the way back to Confluence Park, Marion took a spill. I slammed on my brakes, but apparently couldn’t stop in time. I went over the handlebars, and that’s just about my last coherent memory for about half an hour. I’m told I ran into Marion’s bicycle, but not Marion. That’s a good thing – I outweigh her by a factor of about two. The next thing I recall is sitting beside the trail, with Marion cleaning my face with a wet handkerchief that I’d apparently given her.

She didn’t believe that I’d blacked out, because during the time I was “off-line,” I’d managed to converse intelligibly with her and the people who’d helped us after the accident

Given my injuries (a painful wrist and shoulder on the right, a jammed finger on the left, and a scrape on the right shoulder to go along with the ones on the face and neck), I thought I must have sprawled out on the ground upon landing. According to Marion, though, I’d tucked and rolled. Nice to believe, but I’ll have to take her word for it. After a few more minutes recovering, we rode back to the car. All I remember of that, really, is arriving at the car and putting the bike onto the rack.

I handed my car keys to Marion, because she was in much better shape than I was. After cleaning up and getting something to eat, I went in to the emergency room. I probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t blacked out. I ended up spending pretty much the rest of Sunday lying around waiting to find out how badly I was hurt.

Not too badly, apparently. Because of the injuries I reported, they took X-rays of my shoulder, my right wrist, and my left hand. Because they were concerned about other injuries that often happen with bicycle crashes, they X-rayed my chest. Because I reported short-term memory loss, they did CT scans of my head and neck. The only thing they found was slight dehydration, which they determined from one of the blood samples they took.

They did have me see my doctor for a followup, which I did this morning. She gave me a recommendation for treating the road rash (“Plastic surgeons smear Bacitracin on everything they do – it’ll help this, too.”) and told me that fractures often don’t show up on X-rays taken immediately after an accident, so I should come back and request another X-ray if the pain doesn’t go away.

I did get to invoke the spirit of John Cameron Swayze, though … it’s a cliche that a watch with a cracked crystal will be a key clue, because the time at which it has stopped is the time the murderer attacked the victim. My watch, a Citizen that I received as a birthday present in 1984, puts the lie to that. It’s still running. I’ll post the movie if I can get it transferred successfully; when I tried before, it locked up the browser.

Gotta love that. This watch definitely deserves a new crystal.