Motorcycle Crash

Free Fall on Highway 1 (recorded the night of the accident, July 21, before the real pain set in).

I was following the fog line when my front tire lipped over the asphalt and climbed the shoulder into the bushes. I rolled off to my left and tumbled to the road until I lay on my back, groaning. I must have hit my left shoulder first, as I feel a partial dislocation and acromioclavicular separation there. It pops as I type. The right is equally sore, more a blunt injury, I think. I haven't looked in the mirror for external orthopedic markers as I fear I can't remove my shirt with shit for shoulders. Inside each scapula is an ache so deep it wraps around my chest like an iron band around a barrel. Rhomboid strain, slight radiculopathy at the fifth thoracic vertebra. My neck burns stiffly; I wrapped a towel around it for a chin rest. I'm creaky and sore but breathing. My left little finger is numb from disk compression in my neck at C7-C8. My helmet spared my skull. As I said, I was following the fog line when I got too close, lipped off the asphalt into the brush. I saw a tree; I don't think I hit it. I didn't get a good look at the bike but it didn't appear too mangled. I feel a generous raspberry on my right knee, I don't know if it bled through, but my kneecap pops in a new way from a partial dislocation. Strangely, before the accident, I was talking to a friend who had fallen from a height out of his truck and suffered a severe concussion that took him five years to recover from. He was misnaming things, calling a stove a refrigerator, calling his employees by the wrong name. I think my brain's OK, it's my neck and shoulders that sustain the agony--worse with movement, of course. I have now cheated death nine times. That doesn't mean I don't have damage, At 53 the human body doesn't bounce anymore, it slams without rebound. Were I six again, running with a football, I would recover quickly. I don't know which impairments will remain. I've doubtless added to my chronic pain.


CE


p.s. I just noticed in a previous comment a challenge to a meme; what work among these media most impacted you in your adult life?

the book:

The Brothers Karamazov


the film / network series:

"Altered States" directed by Ken Russell, written by Paddy Chayevsky


the music / spoken word recording:

Bob Dylan "Highway 61" Columbia


(challenge by Sam Rasnake)