Life Can Be Fleeting

Fortunately in this case it stuck around.

I myself had an experience like that once. About a decade ago when we were heavy into mountain biking, Donna and I took a trip to western North Carolina with the Augusta Bike Club to ride some trails and camp for the weekend. It was Saturday morning and we were returning back to camp from our 11 mile loop. The last mile or so was all downhill and Donna knowing I liked to go faster than her said, “Wait for me at the bottom.” Off I went barreling down. I was starting to catch some of the other riders who were ahead of us when my front tire hit a rut or something. My bike stopped and I did not. The next thing I knew I was coming to with people standing over me, I was out for a minute or so. Best we can tell is that I went over the handlebars and landed on my head breaking my foam helmet right in half longitudinally. I had a point and shoot camera in a fanny pack that was smashed from when I landed on my back after continuing my somersault. I rode the last of the 1/2 mile down the hill with the thing bothering me the most being a flap of skin the size of a dime missing off my right index finger. My cycle computer was stuck at 28.4 MPH, I guess that is how fast I was going before launching myself off the bike. We packed up the car and headed back home because we knew I was not going to be riding anymore and would be sore the next day and might not be in condition to drive the 4 hours home.

Yesterday was Jared’s. He is the 10 year-old and youngest son of our friends. We have been baby sitting him and his brother once a month ever since they have been a year or so old. We have watched them play baseball and basketball for fun. Whenever we are free the 2 families get together for Sunday lunch to catch up on how our weeks are going. When we didn’t get the call to lunch today we figured they were busy with Jared playing baseball. Later in the afternoon a mutual friend called to let us know that Jared was in the hospital and had been since yesterday evening. He was at a friend’s house and they were playing around the friends electric scooters. You know the kind, they go for like $150-200 with small gas engines. They can’t go too fast, but down hill they can get going pretty good. Jared was barreling down a hill behind their house when the front wheel caught on something and he and the scooter went down hard. The handlebar got rotated 90 degrees and he slammed on top of that bar with his abdomen. The skin was not punctured do to the rubber grip on the end, but he hit with enough force that it pushed its way through the muscle and abdominal walls mushing up a section of small intestine. The intestine poked out of this fissure creating a fist sized bulge under the skin. A trip to the Aiken Hospital emergency room was followed by an ambulance trip to the Medical College of Georgia’s Children’s Hospital in Augusta. Last night Jared had 40cm (8″) of his damaged small intestine removed. For the next 5 to 7 days will be fed intravenously until he heals. Right now he is also getting a morphine drip to dull the pain of having had his entire small intestine pulled out of his body and then put back through a 6″ incision in his belly to get inspected for any other damage.

One or two inches either way, in either of these instances, could have meant a broken neck and quadriplegia for me or a ruptured aorta and death for him. Let’s be careful out there.