Peter's Ranting: Coping with a long term injury (the story of why my arm looks funny)

Disclaimer: This is a personal story about long term injury and is not intended to trivialize the struggles of those people who suffer from more severe injuries or handicaps and who cannot use bicycles to the same ends. 


When I started riding bicycles, I discovered a wonderful way of escaping the rules and regulations I faced in life. I was so naive that i presumed myself a bicycle mechanic and started collecting old scrap bikes to fix and sell.

When I was 16, my passion for bikes took a serious turn when I started working at a local bike shop. By that time I had discovered the joys of the BMX bike and had become fairly serious about riding. Launching myself down sets of 10 or more stairs and landing on flat ground at the bottom was normal to me. In fact, I was so blinded by inexperience that a truly terrifying 30 foot step-down at a set of local jumps didn't even scare me. I rode over it all the time on my BMX bike, challenging mountain bikers to do the same. One time at the age of 18, I brought a coworker with me. He rode a full suspension mountain bike and when he saw me do the massive 30 foot drop, he simply said “Ok, now do it on a real bike”. Foolish young me pedalled slowly over the edge and promptly fell over the handle bars, snapping both arms and scraping my face badly on the rocky slope before the landing. I woke up in bandages. Before i fell asleep (from a combination of true weariness and a concoction of strong pain killers administered by the surgeons), I was told that my arm were being held together by screws and plates and that my face looked like Two Face from the Batman comics.

The healing process was slow but successful until another night when luck didn't seem to like me. A few weeks after being cleared to return to work with my freshly healed arms, I decided to ride my longboard instead of my bike to avoid road vibration. I also made the decision to do this at night. Without lights. So the pickup truck driver can't really be blamed for not seeing me. He never actually hit me so he never even knew I fell. He just drove off, oblivious. I, on the other hand, had jumped off my board when he pulled out of the driveway. Realizing I had glass bottles in my bag, I decided not to roll, but to try and land on my feet from full speed. When that failed, I put my arms out to stop myself as I fell. Next thing I knew, my right arm had a funky new shape. I went home, splinted the arm, put on a long sleeve shirt so it wasn't visible, and went out to continue boarding.

That was four years ago. My arm is still the exact same shape it was after that night I had the mix up with the truck. It healed like that. The radius bends upwards in the middle and the ulna bends up at the wrist, leaving the joint in a somewhat dislocated state. The human body is absolutely amazing at healing itself, so the range of motion has come back, albeit off axis a little. There is chronic pain, though. A fair amount of it. I sometimes feel like the old men in cartoons who say they can feel a storm brewin' in their rusty joints. The slightest humidity triggers arthritic symptoms. Any slight impact in the wrong place triggers a wave of hot pain throughout my arm. I never actually enjoyed prescription pain pills because of the feelings of numbness that come with them. I never even finished the bottle of codeine that they gave me when I left the hospital. So aside from the occasional herbal remedy, I don't take anything for it. I could get it fixed, but it would involve removing the current hardware and starting the whole process from scratch. It's not that I'm scared of the pain, more that I'm scared of losing another year or two of my life right in the middle of my 20's. It will have to be fixed at some point. It's inevitable. I just want to wait until my life is both financially and emotionally stable enough to take the time and heal properly. Ironically there's only one thing that really helps with both the physical pain from my arm and the painful guilt of ruining my body through stupidity. That one thing is riding bicycles, the exact thing that put me in this mess to begin with.

There's two different reasons behind it.

First is the physical benefits. I'm not talking about fitness here. Well I kind of am, but fitness is a byproduct, not the end goal. When I ride my bike, the first thing that hits me is how well the bike is set up. How well it corners. How smoothly it accelerates. The first few minutes of the ride are always consumed by examining the details of the setup, even on my own personal bike. Once that wears off, a period of slight discomfort happens. I feel the tightness in my wrist and the general body stresses of riding a bicycle. But after about ten minutes, the ride takes effect and i feel the waves of dopamine, the body's natural feel-good chemical hitting me and I can't stop smiling or even laughing. After another ten minutes, I feel the all the pain in my body dissipate and be replaced with a warm, fuzzy feeling as I get into the swing of it. After I'm done, I can still be feeling giddy and pain free hours later. On top of that is the adrenaline rush of doing tricks on a bike. Obviously I can't do the tricks I used to try. Barspins, tailwhips, and big no-handers are relegated to the foam pit for me now. In the real world, the tricks I do are simple and I focus on smoothness. With a nicely shaped ramp, simply laying the bike flat on a nice high transfer and feeling the G-forces gives a strong enough shot of adrenaline to make the warm, fuzzy feeling turn a feeling of overflowing with sheer power.

Bikes unlock the body's best built-in drugs.

Second is overcoming adversity. Bicycles were supposed to be an escape from school, from social drama, from road rules, from housework, from everything. I trusted them to bring me some kind of enlightenment and they threw me under the bus, or over the bars, as the case may be. So yes, I want to overcome every challenge a bike can throw at me. The lasting arm injury prevents me from overcoming the specific challenges that I used to dream of taking on, and I have to accept that I no longer have a chance of being a professional BMX rider. So the only way to beat the bikes at their own game is to change my perspective on cycling. The goal is no longer to learn all the tricks or to reach a certain level of ability. The goal now is to enjoy bicycles to their fullest extent. That means I no longer focus on BMX exclusively so I have more opportunities to enjoy bicycles. That broader focus lets me perform better at the shop (yes, I still work at that bike shop) with an expanded bicycle encyclopedia inside my head. Now, I actually care about the single mom who needs her bike to get to work or the kid who has a disability and rides a recumbent trike to cope because I identify with them. I understand that it's not just a sport to them, they actually need their bikes to maintain their lifestyle. I want them to have the best bike possible so I do mind numbing amounts of research and experiments with bikes to perfect my craft. So while I still struggle with the reality of my permanent injury and I never got my enlightenment, I at least found some small eureka that my opening up my mind to the wild diversity of the cycling world could lead to beating my problems. I fight my demons not only by making bikes better for myself, but by making bikes better and more accessible for everyone.