On Monday morning, September 14th at approximately 7:40 AM, while pedaling to school I was hit by a red GMC Sierra truck. Clearly, I am not dead...just thought I'd mention that first before getting into the details of the incident.
I was riding my bike down Bulldog Blvd. There is no bike lane and traffic is pretty heavy at that time of the morning because Provo High School is on that street and BYU is right around the corner. I am not very confident with my riding-in-traffic-by-myself skills as evidenced by the fact that I crashed all by myself twice during the first week of school. Plus the fact that my roommate was riding on the street down Bulldog Blvd. last week and wrecked her bike. As a result of all of this, I was riding my bike on the sidewalk. The left sidewalk. Which I don't know if that's not proper because obviously you drive on the right side, but I don't know if you're supposed to ride on the right side. Perhaps that decision contributed to the incident.
Anyway, I was on the sidewalk approaching the Conoco gas station driveway. There was a huge red truck nosing its way onto the sidewalk trying to make a right turn onto Bulldog Blvd. I slowed down because I am an extremely paranoid rider. I never expect anyone to see me and even if they do see me, I never expect them to wait for me. (Most of my readers have lived in Provo, you know what it's like.) So I slowed, but didn't completely stop. The red truck was definitely stopped, I double checked to make sure his tires were completely immobile, and they had been for my entire approach so I figured he wasn't going anywhere. His truck was too high for me to make eye contact with (which the insurance lady asked me later). His truck was a little far into the driveway so instead of just going straight across the sidewalk as if there had been no car, I had to do a slight maneuver around the truck. Well, I tried to anyway. If I had been able to complete the maneuver I would have been able to stay on the sidewalk. I guess I could have gone around the back of the truck but that would have been a very round-about way to get across the driveway and then I would have had to worry about cars turning into the gas station that wouldn't have been able to see me because of the giant truck. And that just seemed like too big of a risk when the truck was clearly stopped and all I had to do was go straight across the sidewalk. Plus I figured even if he didn't see me up to that point, he definitely would notice as I started to pedal right in front of him. (Wrong.) See? I really thought about this whole thing before it happened, I am not a reckless biker. Despite all this planning, I should have just stood up and waited for the truck to make his right turn.
At this point, I am not exactly sure what happened. After slowing down and seeing the stopped truck, I started to enter the driveway and then I started to hear this crunching sound. I realized that the truck did not see me and started to turn right onto Bulldog. My front tire got stuck underneath his front right tire and my bike was forced to turn right with it. I think my entire body was also torqued into turning right because my entire left side from my head down to my knee and my planted right knee also were extremely sore a few hours later. Miraculously, his complete ignorance of my presence under his truck caused him to accelerate pretty rapidly, which somehow tore the bike out from under me or between my legs, I don't really know, so that I did not get dragged along with the bike.
As my bike started to slip away all I could think of was, "are you kidding me? This is really happening? I just got hit by a car. I don't even like riding my bike, I am terrified of it. This is totally not even worth it. And this guy is going to keep on driving and never even notice me sitting here on the sidewalk." I didn't even try and go after my bike at this point. I seriously just sat there in complete shock. I realized then that Dad and I have our triathlon on Saturday, which was the whole reason I bought the bike. Then after a minute of processing I looked back to the street and noticed my bike got left in the street so I went to go pick it up . I pulled my bike onto the sidewalk and threw my helmet on the ground. A couple of men walked over and offered me my water bottle that fell off my bike and a cell phone to call the police and ambulance. I was totally fine so I didn't want to call an ambulance or anything and I didn't think there would be any point in calling the police because I thought the truck had driven away, never to know that he had hit me. So I turned around and saw that the truck finally had stopped and was coming back.
A BYU Policeman was driving down Bulldog and stopped to help. He has no real authority to do anything so he radioed the real Police and made sure I was okay. The man in the red truck came up with a confused look on his face like me and the two other men staged the whole scene and he didn't think it was real and said, "sorry lady. I didn't see you." I looked at him and said, "Clearly."
I called Dad and that's when I started balling. As soon as I got a hold of Dad, the fake BYU cop kept trying to ask me what happened so I had to hang up with Dad. I didn't know until later, but at this point Dad started driving to Provo. The fake cop asked the driver for his license and insurance card. His insurance card was expired and I said, "great."
My roommate, Kristen (who had been throwing up all night and could barely get out of bed that morning) drove by, swerved across two lanes of traffic to turn around and help me. While we were waiting, the driver kept rubbing this tiny spot of blue paint transfer from my bike. And I thought, "really? You've got to be kidding me. Get over it." Then the real police came and I had to fill out an accident report. I was so annoyed so I just rushed through that thing. Ten minutes after I had finished I looked and saw that all he had filled out was his name. Did I mention this guy was Hispanic? At this point I almost lost it. I looked at Kristen and said, "did I really just get hit by an illegal immigrant?" I really wanted to get off the street so I was going to call my friend Alex who served a mission to Mexico City to come and translate but he was where I was supposed to be, in class. So then I was going to ask if he wanted me to write down his side of the story, because it seemed like he could speak some English, and maybe just couldn't write it. But finally he went over to the cop and said something so maybe he wrote it in Spanish or something.
So the cop cited the driver for failing to yield to a pedestrian and gave me a copy of the police report. It was then that Kristen reminded me that we are taking a cycling class and so I now had to rent a bike for that too. I could not have needed a bike more than I do this week. I asked the cop if his insurance would pay for my bike rental fee for the class and for the triathlon this weekend and he said he didn't know. Do cops ever know anything you need them to?
We finally wrapped up and Kristen put my bike in the back of her car and the driver said sorry again. I put on my best "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Veruca Salt and Violet Beauregard 'Let's be friends...best friends' face" and I said, "I'll call ya later."
I called Dad back and told him what happened. I guess he turned around and went back to work, but he never even told me he was on his way. I went to school an hour late. Then at noon I finished with classes and saw that I had 5 missed calls from mom and I felt horrible. I hadn't called her because I didn't want to worry her unnecessarily. Apparently Dad had. I checked my voicemails. The first said that mom was leaving school. The second said she was getting off the freeway. The third said she was parked a block away from campus. Luckily, the last voicemail was only left about 10 minutes earlier so I hadn't made her wait for too long. She had called a sub and wanted to make sure I was okay with her own eyes. We went and got my bike out of Kristen's car and went to rent a bike for my cycling class. This was when my left side started to hurt and I noticed a bruise forming on my left tibia. I felt super bad for making Mom feel like she had to leave school and drive all the way down to Provo for nothing. Especially because Mom doesn't even miss school when she's sick and she left in the middle of school to come check on me. This experience made me very grateful for loving and worrying parents and the big guy upstairs because I could have been as bent up as my bike.
Bringing us all up to date, the insurance people are waiting to hear from the driver who has conveniently not returned their phone calls. They also want to get an estimate from the bike shop to see how much it would take to fix the bike. This is a ridiculous waste of time because the bike is completely wrecked. So Dad and I are going to get a new bike this afternoon and I'll try riding it around a little bit before the triathlon tomorrow morning. We'll see.
As you can see the pedal is no longer attached to the bike. This must be where it scraped along the road.
