finally looked at my bike

[solarbird]

It's seriously fucked. The back wheel is bent, by which I mean, somebody took a third of it and BENT IT at a serious angle. There are serious brake skids all along the metal rim - whatever happened, I saw it coming. The frame itself is torqued in the same direction as the real wheel - the chain sticks out past the frame in ways it really shouldn't. The derailleur is bent in a really bad way - it may be salvageable, it may not be, I dunno. But it's not in line anymore. The front wheel is no longer true, but only in the sense that wheels fall out of true, so that's no problem. A good bike shop could fix that in five minutes.

I don't know whether the frame is salvable. It may be, it may not be, I don't know enough about bike repair. But it's got a severe curve to it, like it got hit at the back from the right side. The back wheel (and associated gearset) is a write-off; it's severely bent, as though from a similar hit in the same direction. The derailleur is probably not salvageable - it's randomly loose in strange ways and bent up pretty badly - but it's possible that someone who knows what they're doing could disassemble it completely and rebuild it and it'd be fine, I don't know. The braking system seems okay.

I dunno what happened, still. It really looks like I got clocked from the right side, towards the back, but I can't say that conclusively. I'm trying to figure out whether it's reasonable that I could have hit a drain, and I'm certainly not going to say no, but the angle of bend in the frame makes me doubt it. I could see the wheel damage coming from a drain grab, no problem. But I have a hard time carrying that angle of bend up to the frame. I would expect the bend to be different, to have a different angle, in the event of a drain grab.

So I dunno. I doubt the bike can be salvaged. That's very unfortunate, given how broke we are now from the hospital bills. We'll just have to see how it goes.

Comments

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

Strange. You probably ought to go back to the site to see if there's anything else around it that could've caused a solo accident. If not..you probably got hit if the bike itself didn't just have a completely screwed up failure, and I'm not sure that sounds like it would even make sense.

[banner.livejournal.com]

If the frame is bent, I'd have to say you got hit by a car. I cannot see how a bike's frame could be bent by an ordinary crash. There just isn't enough energy involved.

As for remembering what happened, well the one time it happened to me where I was in an accident and had memory loss it took a long time for it to come back, and oddly enough it came back backwards. That is I remembered things after and worked back to what caused it. I don't know if that was typical or just my case. Head trama is weird. Maybe if you took the same route again on foot after you heal up you might be able to remember it. Who knows?

I'd also say though that someone should start posting flyers in the area and at the school for witnesses. If you were hit by a car and there was more than one person in it, maybe someone will come forward once they know that no one died.

Last of all, once you get well maybe we can start a bicycle fund :-)

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

I'd be in on a bicycle fund.

[cafiorello.livejournal.com]

I'm in.

Cathy

[dpawtows.livejournal.com]

I'm in, too.

[quen-elf.livejournal.com]

And me.

[epawtows.livejournal.com]

Anything needed besides a bike?

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

You don't need to keep the bike in its current "pristine" condition for insurance purposes, do you?

[solarbird]

I don't understand.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Don't even try to get the bike repaired until any and all appropriate insurance agents have looked at it.

[solarbird]

Oh, okay. That's a good point. I wonder if our insurance covers the bike. That'd be really convenient.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you have insurance. Will anyone, police or insurance company, need to see the bike in its current condition? Would this be relevant for "hit and run" vs. "you did something stupid and got into an accident"?

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

Yay, bike fund!

[lyricae.livejournal.com]

Once you are ready to resume biking and until you can afford to replace yours, you are totally welcome to borrow mine which is brand new and due to laziness here at the Couvillion house has never ever been ridden.

[epawtows.livejournal.com]

As for memory issues- Yvonne has never recalled anything about her accident, nor anything that happpened in the hospital afterwards, prior to her becoming more or less her old self (I personally think it's a good thing that she doesn't remember any of that). It sounds like she was hurt worse than you were, though.

[ypawtows.livejournal.com]

Drain bamage can do that to you. :b

I have no memory between stopping for lunch on the way home and... some point in the hospital. (Hospital food is HORRID, but still better than "Ensure".)