The Crash

This is Part 2 of my story. If you're just joining: Part 1 was the girl at the YMCA pool, and the dream that waited thirty years. By now I was deep in training for Ironman Mont Tremblant. Which brings us to a Saturday morning in Maine.

I had been told by numerous people that if you bike enough, eventually you crash. "Happens to everyone." I was always a conservative rider, and I hoped it wouldn't happen to me.

That Saturday, my number was up.

I had a three-hour ride and a thirty-minute run on my training schedule. The plan had been to do it on my trainer and treadmill during the week. But a few friends were doing a long ride early Saturday morning, so I decided to join them. At that point in Ironman training, three hours of riding and a short run barely registered as a workout. I'd be home right after the kids finished breakfast, and we'd have the whole day together.

Four of us met at 6 a.m. It was cool and crisp - I had my arm warmers on and had thought about wearing pants, but I knew I'd warm up fast. Blue skies, sunny, almost no cars. We took turns riding in front, chatting as we went, and after about ninety minutes of back roads we ended up in South Freeport, on a loop I loved: challenging, low-traffic, beautiful. I had ridden that road no fewer than a hundred times.

We climbed one of the first hills, the two other women a few bike lengths ahead, my friend and I behind. Coming down the next descent, I pulled ahead a bit, enjoying the speed and the morning. I was in my aero bars - not something I did often on downhills, but I knew this road well and felt completely comfortable.

Then I heard a car coming.

I started to veer right to give it room - and heard a scream behind me. Everything happened in a flash, and in slow motion at the same time. Car on my left. The front of my friend's wheel on my right. I reached for my brakes, but our bikes had already touched - her front tire, my back tire - and I felt myself skidding, then flying.

I held onto the bike, and in that split second I had exactly one thought: MY HEAD. Keep your head off the ground. I had been a critical care nurse for twenty years by then. I had spent my career with head trauma. It was engraved in me.

My head hit the ground first anyway. Then the rest of me. I flew across the road and landed in the breakdown lane on the other side.

I stood up immediately. Oh my God, I'm okay. I saw a car coming in the other lane and screamed for it to stop - my friend was down on the other side of the road. She got up. A second car stopped on my side. The driver asked if he should call for help.

We were both standing, so we told him no. "We're okay!" Both cars left, and we were alone on the road with debris scattered everywhere, keeping it together.

Here is how okay we were: we spent several minutes putting my chain back on so I could ride home. I got on the bike - covered in road rash, wearing a cracked helmet - and only gave up when I discovered the gears didn't work. Thank goodness they didn't, or I would have tried to bike home. That's what shock looks like from the inside. It looks like "I'm fine."

I called my husband, but the connection was terrible. All he got was crash - pick me up - I'm okay before it cut out, with no location. So we waited by the side of the road, my legs oozing blood, while a few people passed us. One cyclist asked if we were okay as he rode by. We said we were waiting for a ride.

Our two friends never came back. They had crested the next hill ahead of us and kept going.

Eventually I saw the mom-minivan coming down the road - my husband, with both kids in the back seat in their pajamas. The kids were upset to see me bleeding and disheveled, and I kept it very low-key, because I did not want them to be afraid of bikes. We dropped my friend at her house and went home.

While I was cleaning my wounds, my husband said, "I'm so glad you're okay. I'm going to take your bike to get checked out right now." My first reaction was - who cares about the bike? I didn't even want to look at it. It took me a few hours to understand what he was actually saying: yes, you crashed, and you're getting back up. It was the best support he could have given me.

The day after the crash, I wrote a blog post about it. I inventoried the damage - road rash on my legs, arms, and hands; a pulled neck and shoulder; a right knee swollen to twice its size; a probable mild concussion; a helmet with a deep crack in the foam that I am convinced saved my life. Miraculously, no broken bones, I wrote.

I was wrong about that, but I wouldn't find out for three weeks.

I ended that post with a list of lessons learned. Number six was: check in with each other. If people are missing, look for them. It is simply the right thing to do.

I wrote it as a general safety tip. The truth is, I wrote it about that morning. In the post I explained that our friends thought we'd stopped for a bathroom break, and I'm sure that's what they thought. They learned that evening what had actually happened. The check-in I kept expecting never came.

I never said anything to them, and I'm not saying it now to point fingers - people miss things, and I don't know what that week looked like from their side. I'm telling you because of what it built in me. I have never again assumed someone behind me is fine, on a bike or anywhere else. When I know someone has gone down - in any sense of the phrase - I check. Lesson six turned out to be the most expensive one on the list.

The weeks that followed were their own kind of endurance event. I spent the first several days doing my own wound care - twenty years of nursing means you do some very competent debridements at your own kitchen table without it ever occurring to you that you could go be a patient somewhere. It took a text from a friend for me to think, maybe I should see someone for all this?

The right knee was the loudest problem. Too swollen to assess at first. Then a week of limping and waiting, each day thinking tomorrow I'll run, each day being wrong. An orthopedic surgeon, a negative X-ray, a hopeful diagnosis of soft-tissue swelling, aggressive physical therapy. I got back in the pool and swam 2,100 yards on the exact day my training plan had called for the longest workout of the year - a 2,500-yard swim, a 100-mile ride, an 8-mile run. Half the Ironman swim distance, and it was the hardest workout I'd done in weeks.

Then, just as the knee turned the corner, my right shoulder wouldn't let go. Another orthopedic visit. A question of a torn labrum. An MRI - my first ever.

I have to stop here and tell you about the MRI, because it taught me something about myself as a nurse. Over the years I had taken care of plenty of patients who were anxious about MRIs, and I confess I never really understood why. Then they strapped me to the table and slid me into the tube, and I understood immediately. Thirty-five minutes in a loud, jackhammering coffin. I held perfectly still, partly for the images and partly because I did not want to spend one extra second in that machine. I have been a more empathetic nurse ever since. Sometimes the only way to learn what your patients feel is to end up on the table.

At 4:30 that afternoon, the doctor's office called. The medical assistant asked if I had a sling at home, and told me to buy one and wear it until my appointment Monday. No other information. I'm not one to give people a hard time, but I wasn't going to wear a sling without knowing why, so I finally said: "Can you please just tell me what it is? I'm an RN and I would like to know."

A fracture of the humeral head. A broken arm.

Three weeks earlier I had written miraculously, no broken bones. I had built an algorithm in my head of every possible outcome and how I would handle each one. A broken arm I'd been walking around with - swimming on, riding on - was not in the algorithm.

The surgeon, who was away on vacation, called us that same evening - one of many people in my life who went far out of their way for me during those weeks, and I have never stopped being grateful. On Sunday, after reviewing the MRI himself, he gave me the verdict: an impact fracture, a lot of swelling, maybe a small tear. No surgery. No treatment, really - just healing, and "activity as tolerated." No swimming for two to three weeks. The bike and the run could continue.

I asked him three more times if he was sure. He was, if I felt good.

So I made the decision I had been circling for a month, six weeks out from the race with a healing broken arm and a knee I didn't fully trust: I was going for it. I ordered a sleeveless wetsuit to take pressure off the shoulder. My coach rebuilt the plan. And I adopted a line that carried me through everything that came next:

Proceed as if success is inevitable.

Whether I made it to the start line at Mont Tremblant - and what happened when I got there - is Part 3.

But before I go, there are two more things about that Saturday. I didn't know either of them at the time. Nobody did.

The first: my right knee got all the attention that summer, and it healed. But my left knee hit the pavement that morning too. It didn't complain much, so I barely mentioned it - not in the posts, not to the doctors. A decade later, that quiet knee is the one that finally presented the bill, and it cost me a knee replacement. The loudest injury is not always the one that matters most.

The second is harder to explain, and I'm still not sure how to tell it. By that Saturday morning, I had already started tripping sometimes. Catching a toe on flat ground. Stumbling over nothing. I never wrote about it, because it didn't seem like anything - everyone trips. The crash didn't cause it. It was already there, quietly, before my wheel ever touched hers.

It would take almost ten more years to find out what it was.

- Angela

Coming soon: Part 3: Becoming an Ironman.