At least with cancer, we could fight

A cyclist was killed in Kirkland recently, the fifth cyclist killed in the greater Seattle area in the past five months. Not a good trend. In this case, the driver had a lengthy record of driving-related infractions and appeared to be inebriated. In all the cases, as far as we know, the cyclists who died were doing everything right, according to the law and common sense, making themselves visible and wearing protective gear, traveling in the bike lane or the appropriate space.

The death has brought some calls for better infrastructure, ways of separating cyclists from those who insist on wielding heavy metal weapons without care. It's a good effort and I'll join my voice to the cause. But this death had me thinking once again just how grateful I am that Sandy didn't die in the collision* on May 5, 2010.

Sandy loved her bicycle. She was very cranky when she was
told to stay off it while the tumor in her femur healed.

Like these other cyclists, she was doing everything right. It was morning rush hour, and she was wearing bright reflective gear, had a headlight on her bike and on her helmet, as well as rear lights. She was in the bike lane, traveling downhill on Pine to catch her bus downtown. As she neared an intersection, a driver pulled his car across the bike lane, craning his neck to see when he could safely pull into the main flow of traffic. Sandy braked, but she didn't have time to stop fully, and she couldn't swerve into cars that were traveling 25 miles an hour or more beside her. Though the day was nippy, the guy had his window down a bit for his dog, and Sandy bodyslammed it, somehow staying on her bike as the full front of her body was thrown against the car. She had a red line across her chest and upper arms from the window's edge.

Sandy wasn't seriously injured. She had the wind knocked out of her and suffered a few bruises. The next day, she'd discover much more challenging stiffness. But at the time of the collision, her bike was more messed up than she was. As it turned out, the driver was himself a cyclist. He felt terrible, and while they awaited police, he got her bike into working order for her. She called me from the site a few minutes after it occurred. I offered to come down and be with her or to fetch her bike, to drive her to work, whatever she wanted. But by the time we'd been on the phone for a bit, her bike was in better shape and she was feeling more confident about just continuing to her bus.

There were many witnesses who saw that the driver was completely at fault. Immediately behind Sandy in the bike lane was the executive director of the Bicycle Alliance of Washington, a worthy advocate if she'd needed one. But the guy knew he was in the wrong, and Sandy and I both wondered how many times we've inched the car across a bike lane, waiting to enter traffic, not even thinking about the lane being there. Especially on unfamiliar streets, with new bike lanes popping up all the time. We resolved to be more alert approaching intersections in bike lanes (though she still wouldn't have had time to do anything differently, we thought there were other situations where we might), and, above all, to be incredibly careful drivers.

It was scary for her and for me. But it wasn't until a few days later that I became incredibly grateful she'd not died. At the time of the collision, Sandy's mortality wasn't prominent in my mind. Frankly, though it was scary, it didn't fully occur to me that she could have died.

The next day, when she was stiff and sore and whiny, her co-workers convinced her to go to Urgent Care to get checked out. (My encouragement to seek medical help just seemed overprotective to her; theirs seemed like common sense. Ahem.) The Urgent Care doc gave her the okay, said she should probably stay off the bike for several days to let herself heal, but that she should be fine.

Before she left Group Health that day, she decided to go ahead and have a chest X-ray that was on order for her. She'd been supposed to have it the week before, the day her doctor ordered it to probe into some breathing problems we'd noticed. Sandy had been having trouble catching her breath on our bike rides, and we were concerned there might be something going on with her heart. Her doctor agreed it was worth checking out: she ordered some blood work, an EKG, a chest X-ray, an echo, and a treadmill test.

That X-ray showed nodules in her lungs, prompting a call from her oncologist. It started us on the road to the metastatic cancer diagnosis and treatment. And suddenly I was face-to-face with Sandy's mortality. But I also knew that cancer was something we could fight. Suddenly it seemed very poignant that she hadn't died on the 5th, hadn't been hit suddenly by something we couldn't defend her from. Many times over the next fourteen months we talked about that; it was something that I, especially, brought up: With cancer, at least we have a chance.

I feel compelled to correct the record about her X-ray and note that the collision itself was not fortunate in any way. Despite what Sandy wrote in her LiveJournal (unreliable narrator that she always was), and despite what many people instinctively thought, that chest X-ray had nothing to do with the collision. Additionally, the collision left her weakened physically and emotionally, less able to handle the stress of learning the cancer had returned and embarking upon incredibly taxing treatment regimens. The only thing good about the collision was that it didn't hurt her worse. But it did not save her. Once she'd realized she'd forgotten the X-ray, she'd planned to have it done the second week of May when she went in for her echo. So we learned about the cancer one week earlier than we might have (and a week later than we would have if she'd not forgotten the X-ray originally), and she was in worse shape for all that followed.

*I'm trying to remember not to refer to collisions between bikes and cars as accidents. The word accident implies that no one is at fault. In a collision between a car and a bicycle, there is usually someone at fault, and most of the time it's the person driving the larger vehicle. The theory is that if we change the language we use, we change the way we think, and we stop looking at these deaths as unavoidable facts of life. I found this argument compelling when I read it recently, and I encourage everyone to be more conscious about when you use the word accident, too. Thank you. Off of soapbox now!