Well, the event to pretty much end the summer has occurred. On Monday afternoon, while mountain biking in a bike park, I took a big fall off a jump and broke my wrist.

Monday morning started at 6:30 a.m. when Rita and I left for the  ferry on our way to Vancouver Island.  We left from Vancouver on the ferry at 8:30 and arrived on the Island around 10 o’clock. We landed in Nanaimo and from there we had to travel three hours to the other side of the island to Tofino/Long Beach. After the three-hour drive, we set up camp and decided to go for a short walk on the beach. It was at this point that we saw the bike park.

After the beach we decided to try the park. The first few times around went fine.  It was actually a little bit boring so I decided to try and get some air. After finding a good jump and a place to get a little bit of speed,  I headed down the hill for my first attempt.  I managed to get the first jump down okay, so told Rita to come and watch the second.  I headed up the hill for my second attempt.

This is when things started to go wrong.  I had enough speed, but as I was about to clear the ramp, my back tire caught the back of the hill, launching me forward over the handlebars.  I knew I was falling so I ditched the bike in the air. I ended up landing on my head and the right side of my body.  As soon as I got up I looked at my wrist and knew that something was definitely wrong. It was twisted in a zig-zag pattern (pic on right isn’t my arm, but mine looked like this) so I tried to push it back into place.  When all I heard were crunches,  I knew it was time to start getting upset. A couple of curse words and a few kicks to the ground later, I grabbed the bike and walked towards the road.  I waved down a local and asked if they knew where the nearest hospital was.  The man in the vehicle (which coincidentally had just built the park) drove us to the walk-in clinic.

It was only bad news from there.  I was sent to the hospital in Tofino–which was 35km away–to get x-rays, and then from there sent all the way back to Nanaimo (3 hours) for surgery the next morning) because my wrist was broken too badly. Luckily it was an external operation, which meant they didn’t have to cut me open; they just had to yank my wrist back into place.

24 hours later, I was all drugged up and lying in a hotel room sleeping off the operation. The following day we got back on the ferry and came back to our place in New Westminster. So much for our trip to Vancouver Island!

Q&A

Did it hurt? Not initially.  But after a couple hours the pain was like nothing I’ve felt before.

What about your head? For about five minutes after the crash everything looked like an overexposed photo.  All I saw was white with black outlines. Luckily I was wearing a helmet so that was the only thing that happened.

What next? In the next couple of days I have to get my arm x-rayed again to see if the bones are still in their proper place. if they are, I have two more weeks in this cast and then three more weeks in another cast. The doctor said it would take about six weeks of physio to recover after that. 12 weeks total >_<.

Are you bummed? Beyond words; but it could have been worse.

How did you type all this? Speech recognition software is a beautiful thing.

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