If you haven’t been around long enough to know that I was hit by a car during the Rouge Roubaix road race back in March, then go read this post now: Rouge Roubaix XV

The insurance case with the driver is settled and closed now. So, I feel that I can tell the rest of the story without some skeezy insurance lawyer questioning my actions following some dumb b**** plowing into me from behind.

In the post about the accident, I left off at a girl hitting me, us gathering her information, and me going to the hospital. All of that happened. However, between getting her information and the trip to the hospital, there was a brief moment where I was laying on the ground, then on my feet, and being incredibly verbally abusive to the woman who’d hit me. I’m one of the least mean-spirited people you’ll ever meet, but I called her all sorts of names, and I don’t feel bad about it at all.

Then, I decided I wanted to try and finish the race. There were 40 something miles and two hard gravel sections left. Louise had passed Amy and I just before I decided to try and continue. I got back on my bike and got on Amy’s wheel, but realized in a couple of minutes that I needed to straighten my handlebars out. Amy stopped with me, but when I realized that I needed to use my multi tool in order to fix them, I told her to go on after Louise (I didn’t know if I could finish, anyway, and I didn’t want to jeopardize Amy’s race).

I rode alone, into the wind, for what seemed like an hour. I could see Amy in the distance until the turn into the next gravel section. It’d been 8 miles since the car had hit me, and, it was then when I hit the potholes and bumps of the gravel that I couldn’t bear the pain in my pelvis any longer and had to withdraw from the race. At that point, I thought that it was broken at my right sacroiliac joint, because the pain was not only radiating from there, it also felt as if my pubic symphysis was unstable.

You know the remainder of the story from there.

My recovery is still not 100%. Physically, my right SI joint still hurts, and the scarring of the muscle seems to be permanent… so my right butt cheek has a flat spot. When I sit wrong or go on long car rides, it takes a few steps to not limp because of it. Psychologically, I still have rare but persistent breakdowns when I’m frightened by drivers. I’m still angry at drivers who have no care for another human’s life. The insurance company took those things into account when paying “pain and injury” money to me, but that doesn’t make it go away.

The CAAD10 that I was riding at the time of the wreck has been revitalized as a weird bastard of spare parts I had around the house. The rear triangle was knocked out of alignment, so it’s off of “work” duty and now is a testament to riding bikes long enough to have a hodgepodge of parts in storage. I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever ride it, but it goes a little like this…

So, now you know the entire story. Here’s to not getting hit by a car again in 2014…