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| The secret to my surviving being hit by a car? |
As a writer, it is always important to get into your characters' heads to know how they think and their motivations to do whatever you have decided they will be doing in the plot. Convincing writing is best derived from the author's personal experiences. I write this as a prologue to telling you about my latest adventure: being hit by a car while riding my bicycle.
I don't know about you, but I sometimes become a voyeur of my own life. I watch myself doing things and I analyze my motivations. In another life I was probably Sherlock Holmes. So four days ago, while riding my bike in the bike lane in the town of Beaverton, I had a front row observation of a man being hit by a car. I saw myself peddling along on an otherwise uneventful ride to Kinko's. I saw a tan colored late model Toyota sedan pull alongside me. We were side by side for perhaps fifty feet, when the driver abruptly turned right into a mini-mall entrance we were passing.
The rest of the event was compressed into time lapse imagery. I braked and started to swerve, but there was nowhere to go but A.) Over the front hood of the car. Or: B.) to bounce off and hope that asphalt was soft as a Sealy Posturepedic® bed.
I took Plan B. My front tire hit the front fender and tire of the car and my bike and I went airborne for perhaps eight feet. That was when my guardian angel suspended the laws of physics and allowed me to land on my back (and most of my right side) without breaking a bone. Being from strong and stubborn Scandinavian stock I only lay on the ground for thirty seconds or so. My glasses and hat had been knocked off by the impact and lay a few feet away. I put them on and then saw the driver of the car had come to a stop beside me. His window was down but I could not see his face. I shouted, "Pull over and park your car!"
I suppose, in hindsight, I might have said a million other things. I could have shouted, "Well, that was fun, but next time, try running over my legs!"
The driver pulled ahead and stopped. A normal person would have gotten out of their car and rushed to my side to say something like, "Oh god, I am so sorry! Are you hurt?" But no, the driver just sat in his car and did nothing. So I sat up and slowly stood, being unsure if I was really okay, and wondering if I might be Bruce Willis's cousin and indestructible. I mention this because I fell down a flight of stairs when I was four years old, onto a slab of concrete, and only broke my collarbone. My theory is that something changed in me at that point besides lost I.Q. points.
Adrenalin is a friend in times like these. I was high on adrenalin, and though the pain was slowly being broadcast to my brain from various parts of my body, my brain was whistling some crazy lyric from the 1980s, like ". . .don't stand so, don't stand so, don't stand so close to me." The man got out of his car. He was a Japanese-American man, a dead-ringer for Pat Morita of Karate Kid fame http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMCsXl9SGgY
"Wax on, wax off," said the driver. I blinked, sure that I'd been transported to Karate Kid IV. Within a few minutes an ambulance, fire truck, and police car arrived. The officer was about to let the old man go without a ticket when an eyewitness showed up. She handed me her card, which indicated she was an off-duty policewoman. You can't get a better eyewitness than that. At that point the officer changed his mind and cited the driver, whose name was Yoichi, age 85. Yoichi was a nice guy; he said he hadn't seen me. Well, yeah, I thought, what's the alternative, that a geriatric group had put a hit on me?
The ambulance driver looked hard at me and asked if I was okay. He did not examine me. When I said I had some pain he didn't say, "Oh, sit down, let me check you out." Instead, he said, "You were lucky. You should buy a helmet. Do you want a ride to a hospital?"
I didn't think I was dying, nor did my bones feel broken or sprained, so I said I'd be fine. I didn't think the obvious: how was I going to get home? Within a few minutes everyone left. I pushed my bike in a circle for a while and then I got a call from a friend and mentioned I needed a ride home. Later, after lying on my bed for several hours, and having left a message for one of my brothers, I went to the VA Hospital in Portland. By then I was just plain silly. I was seeing the comedy of the event and was making jokes with the staff as they checked me out. They did CT scans, and one X-Ray. They wanted to X-Ray my head because my jokes were indicators I'd hit my head, but they also said by shooting my head full of radiation would adversely affect my thyroid and gray matter, so I declined their offer. Pain has a way of sneaking up on a person who has been tossed onto asphalt, but I didn't think that one through. I was loony because I knocked my noggin a wee bit.
If you have watched Scrubs, you know there are characters in hospitals. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldZoJvY5i1I I recommend any aspiring comedy writer to spend half a day in their local hospital if they are running low on comic material. I had hit the Mother Lode of situational comedy. The very first thing they did, once they decided I was patient worthy, was to strap a neck brace on me. The nurse asked, before she put the brace on what my pain level was on a scale of one to ten. I said it was about five. After she put it on she asked what my pain level was and I said it was at least ten. I didn't say that to mess with her head, the brace made things worse. Later they would make me undress without taking the brace off. I think that was when I grew two inches.
The young woman who first came to look at me was a fourth year medical student named Amity, like the horror movie. She looked like she was from the South Pacific, and the doctor, whose name was Dr. Tom, seemed right out of a daytime drama. While they distracted me by probing my body with their zoological experiment of looking for my spleen, a big man named Eric was strapping my right arm with an intravenous tube just in case they wanted to give me smoothies.
My brother eventually found me. I had been prodded and probed for over two hours and there is only so much you can ask of your siblings before they walk away from you. When he came in to my curtained room I was sitting in a lotus position. He joked that it looked like the staff had taken off my legs. This is why my family has been able to weather so many recent calamities. We make jokes about everything. I told him I was the type of guy who would be making a pun and I keel over onto my head. My brother had recently spent a week in a hospital due to pneumonia. He said his blood pressure had gone down to 50 over 50. Any lower and he'd be a troglodyte crawling onto land from a primordial soup.
They were about to release me. A nurse checked my vitals once more. I had 100% oxygen level, which will probably get me on the Dean's List. My blood pressure was 130 over 70. I was underweight, and under-loved, but my bones were made of a new space age material. I don't know what the hospital did with the blood they took from me, but I expect the government will be phoning me soon to find out why I'm so tough. I suspect it is due to my ingestion of multi-vitamins and those delicious Bob's Red Mill Steel Cut Oats http://www.bobsredmill.com/steel-cut-oats.html Or, maybe I'm just lucky.
