A neighbor of the university where I work needed a favor, which I was happy to do. They even invited me to a little “refreshment” before hand, but I had to decline and get some work done. I did said favor and left, walking South on Charles Street. I made it ten feet before having to stop because a driver had pulled her car out of the parking garage and across the sidewalk. She was engrossed in watching the traffic coming from her left and did not notice the pedestrian on her right. When the traffic was too dense to merge into, she turned sharply to the right to, I suppose, get into the lane freed up the parked cars which were gone by that time of day. She did this, hit my leg with her car and kept moving. I tapper her fender and yelled and tried to back away. But my foot was stuck.
Okay, I totally screamed like a child — both because it freakin hurt and because I was trying to get her attention to get the hell off of my foot. It didn’t work, so I resorted to banging on her hood. This all happened in like five or ten seconds. She looked at me, said, “Oh!” and took long enough to put her car in reverse and back up for me to think (perhaps outloud), “What the fuck is taking you so fucking long to get your fucking car the fuck off of my fucking foot?!”
She got out, said, “I didn’t see you!” I yelled something like, “You should be looking where the fuck you’re going!”
After the last time I got hurt by someone else’s fault and couldn’t do anything to get them ticketed or at least forced by police to move that pipe, I told her I was calling the cops. She got UPSET. I hung up on 911 and explained to her that I didn’t do it right that time and was going to do it right this time. 911 called me back. I refused an ambulance because downtown Baltimore at 4pm on a Friday is a place where you let the ambulances that can make it through traffic carry people with actually life-threatening injuries. They sent the police. The Fire Department came, too. They were very nice, offered me a lift to the hospital and checked out my foot. When I told them what happened, they had a, “How stupid can a person be?” look which made me smile.
She had a police sticker on her car, was the only one that talked to the police and told her insurance company (to whom she still hadn’t given a statement Monday afternoon) that she would get the police report. The paranoid person in me smells something fishy, but I happen to know the boss of that district through work, and I know people who know him better than I do. With her repeating, “I didn’t see you!” over and over, I suspect she thought I was going to say she hit me on purpose. That sounds strange, but I can see why she might think that. But, like I told her insurance company, I don’t dispute that she didn’t see me. She wasn’t looking at all, and that’s how it happened!
Everyone left, and my family took me to the emergency room. Had to ride in a wheelchair, and my foot was ballooning. Turns out that my foot was “trauma-ed” and my big toe broken (fragged, I believe). I have to see a foot specialist and make sure nothing is forever wrong. With how I depend on my feet, I would go nuts if this person’s negligence hurt me permanently. I think she also thought I might be more interested in getting her arrested than making her insurance company pay my medical bills instead of making my health insurance do it. When I called her insurance company over an hour later, she hadn’t reported a thing.
In Maryland, for what she did, she could go to jail, be fined and get points taken off of her license. I’m going to suggest that Maryland suspend your license if you injure a pedestrian.
For now, I’m in a boot and on crutches and can’t put any weight on my foot at all. As you can imagine, crutches are a lot of fun when your wrist is broken. On the other hand, they gave me very strong pain killers, so I can get to sleep. I always wake up with sore hips from being knocked out by drugs hard enough to not move, though. I’m working from home and haven’t left my apartment since Saturday. This blows and hard.
So my new bike is getting returned. I bought it quickly because it was a good sale. I thought I’d be riding, at least a little, by the end of next week, if not sooner. But now, when I can ride again is undetermined. I’m flirting with being depressed, and I can’t look at that thing knowing that the carelessness of one person might keep me off of it for more weeks or months. I can always buy it again later. There’s something fun about getting to actually ride your new bike that I keep missing and would like to get to do. So I get a do-over here. Screw the sale.
The other fun thing is dealing with an insurance company who is acting that this could in any way by MY fault! They even asked about my shoes (Tevas) and commented that it was the only protection I had — like we should all walk around in warm weather in armored boots so the negligent drivers of the world can run us over with impunity.
I think I might have to get a lawyer.
