It’s been almost ten months now since the incident. My wife, Lori, used to call it the accident but I would tell her, “I have no memory of the moment of occurrence so I cannot confidently say whether it was an accidental or intentional incident.”

I tend to talk (type) a lot these days, mostly about myself. If you’re not inclined to read a stream of meaningless babble just skip over it. I won’t be offended.

On 18 May 2013, Saturday morning, I was riding south on the flyway to meet my friends for lunch in El Dorado. The state trooper first on site noticed a blood glucose kit among the items scattered from my saddlebags and instructed the arriving EMTs to check my blood sugar level. It measured forty-eight. Well that’s it, he thought, he must’ve lost consciousness, lost control and fell off the bike at highway speed. Witnesses reported that the bike was swerving violently before it ejected the rider and flipped. They reported that the bike ran over the rider, but things can look misleading from a distance.

When my friends went to retrieve the machine they found it wouldn’t hold air at all in the rear tire and discovered a hole that, as they described it, looked like someone had pierced the tire with a large bolt and removed it. My assessment is that I experienced sudden and complete deflation and did not handle it well.

The trooper on the scene said, “He kept trying to turn over but I was afraid he would drown in the blood.”

If my memory serves the list of the injuries went something like this. There was a broken wrist and thumb. The middle finger of the left hand was broken above the knuckle on the hand. The left big toe was broken. The flesh was ground off both knees. The left side of the lower lip had been ripped loose and there was extensive damage to the face. The inside of the mouth contained a laceration. I’m not sure what that one means. There was a concussion and corresponding brain bleed on one side of the brain. A few days later there would be a matching wound to the other side. There was a brain sheer which as I understand it was between the frontal lobe and the main part of the brain. There was very extensive road rash on the face and the back of both hands. The doctor reported that both eye sockets were broken all the way around. There was a “Break with minimal displacement of the C1” and the neck and throat were damaged enough that food was not possible during the next three days. I have only one very short memory of the following two and one half weeks.

They initially flew my broken self by helicopter some sixty miles to Stormont Vail Hospital in Topeka. The incident occurred on the Kansas Turnpike just below Emporia, Kansas.

The doctors advised my wife, Lori, that the brain injuries would take six months or a year or more to heal. “He has no filter,” they said. They were correct. I did not. I told my friends that whatever bounced between my ears would come out my mouth.

A normal person carries an image in front of him that he tries to show to all he sees. The last thing he will do before speaking or acting is ask himself, “How will this make me look?” I had no such question. What I am is what you will likely see. Even well down the road to healing, maybe completed, I still have no inclination and no patience for deceit and pretense. I tell my friends also that the world would be a better place to live if we all took a couple of quick shots to the head.

The path to physical healing has been slower than I would have chosen. Lori did a great job of taking care of me when I could not take care of myself. I wore a neck brace until almost August. I wore bandages on my hands and knees for a long, long time. I participated in physical therapy to assist with regaining use of the wrist and hand. They both now have metal inside and a four inch scar where the doctor had gained access to the injured bone.

It was after one of those physical therapy sessions that they took me to the emergency room at St. Luke’s Hospital. I had been showing off a bit for the therapist and I came very close to fainting. They measured my blood pressure and one of the numbers was well below sixty. I think it corresponded to the blood sugar figure at the incident scene. They took most of the afternoon trying to determine what went wrong. I was so weak that my spouse had to hold my instrument while I urinated lying on my back. They sent the medical personnel and my daughter out of the room for that incident.

Ultimately they decided I was dehydrated. The doctor twice (two times) fed a liter of liquid directly into my blood stream. After the second one he declared it wasn’t back to normal but was within acceptable parameters. He strongly advised me not to let it happen again and to see my regular physician.
I was greatly disappointed the first time I tried to support my weight on my knees and discovered they were both opened up and bleeding. It had a tendency to destroy the romantic mood of the moment but fortunately wasn’t made known until after the important feat had been completed.

I’m mostly healed now. I have to a great extent retained some of the changes resulting from the brain injuries. I am unclear as to how much of the change is physical and how much is experiential. I have a good friend, an RN, who has worked with brain injured patients and she tells me she’s pretty sure it’s a 70/30 split. Whatever its reason it is what it remains. My wife has recently given up her hope that things will ever be just like they were before the incident.

Many people can’t handle complete frankness and it gets interpreted as anger. I have friends who used to enjoy being around me that don’t so much anymore. I have friends who used to not like me so much and now they think I’m a lot of fun. I’m pretty comfortable with who and what I am.

I have a tendency to be difficult to get along with. That makes me largely ineffective in committee situations. Things, responsibilities, will of necessity continue to change. I have come to accept that I have a tendency to be a bit of an asshole. I’m okay with that. What I want to be is the most generous and kindest asshole that anyone could hope to meet.

Soon after the incident I was deeply impressed that I had been spared the natural result of hitting the pavement at eighty miles per hour for a very specific reason. The normal middle class things of life lost all sense of importance to me and I was greatly impressed that all that really matters in this life is how I can be of service to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. That sense of urgency has faded some and it bothers me. I don’t want to have to do it again.

I’ve been riding since mid-August. The day after they called to tell me I was okayed to drive I rode the bike to work some sixty miles west. I still tend to get scared sometimes when I’m in traffic at flyway speeds. I decided long ago that I will let my fears speak to me, maybe advise me, but not to control me.

I’m still learning to deal with the world around me. I still have intermittent memory lapses. It’s not so much that the memory is gone as it is that the path to a particular memory has been severed. Sometimes it can be a word or name that I have used just a short time before. I tell my wife that I am as brilliant as I ever was, but it is punctuated by times of absolute ignorance. The problem is determining which is which.

Seems like a ramble this long should end with some sort of moral to the story. I don’t have one. We are the culmination of the experiences and choices of our lives. The more severe the experience, the deeper is the impact on one’s life. I am what I am and I’m okay with that. A friend compared my experience to the story of the young man who ended up amputating his own arm to get off the mountain and save his life. He related that he was actually thankful for the boulder that fell on his arm. My friend asked me how I related to that. I responded that I related very well. I am thankful for the experience that brought me to what I am today. I regret, or at least would if I were capable, the pain and stress that was caused to happen to those who love me, but for me it was worth the ride.

If you’ve taken the time to read this far, I thank you for your endurance. It was mostly for me anyway. Maybe we’ll meet on the road somewhere. When we do, it’s a shame that you’ll have to deal with an asshole, but rest assured I’ll be one of the nicest assholes you’ve encountered. If not just let me know. It won’t change anything in me, but you’ll feel better for having made yourself known.