Why brakes are important

So Tuesday after class, I hopped on my bike to head home. It was lightly raining. It wasn't enough for me to bother with a rain jacket, or to worry about it getting in my eyes too much while riding. I didn't feel like getting too worked up, since I had a lot of homework to get done that night, so I was taking it pretty easy. Also, I've been riding more cautiously in the rain here anyway; my bike's brakes are pretty remarkably ineffective when they're wet. The tires still grip the road surface just fine, but it takes several wheel revolutions of full pressure braking before enough moisture is swept off of the rims for the brakes to start applying any deceleration to the wheels.

Topographically speaking, the route home goes slightly downhill, slightly uphill, flat, slightly uphill, downhill, uphill, and then downhill to the driveway. On the second to last downhill portion, the car ahead of me slowed down and stopped--I think the car in front was making a right turn and waiting for a traffic break (in Japan cars drive on the left side of the road), but that detail is a little bit irrelevant. There was a comfortable distance between me and the car, so I started applying the brakes, not really thinking too much of anything.

After the normal period of not doing anything, though, by brakes continued to not do anything. I realized that my options had suddenly become very limited. To the left of the car was a guardrail, and not enough room to walk by, let alone ride by at 30 mph, which is what I'm realistically estimating my speed at. To the right of the car was oncoming traffic. My rear brake is never powerful enough to lock the rear wheel anyway, and the plastic pedals on the bike are too slippery to allow it, so a move like a skater's hockey stop wouldn't work at all. Again because of the pedals, trying to bail out and just jump off the bike would probably just make me fall uncontrolled and piledrive my bike into the car.

Anyone who's squeamish and has an active imagination should skip the next four paragraphs...

Having gone through that many rejected options, I was out of time and simply ran straight into the car. My front wheel hit the bumper first, and I was launched off the saddle into the vertical rear door. I'm pretty sure it was my left shoulder that put the dent in the door panel; my mouth hit the glass. As I got up I was bleeding pretty profusely. I thought it was a nasty nosebleed.

The driver moved her car out of the intersection, and I picked up my stuff and moved it off of the road. Offering me tissues to try to control the blood, she first confirmed that I had insurance before calling the police and sentencing me to medical care. While she did that, I used the car's glass to inspect the damage to myself. I didn't have a nosebleed, I had a laceration between my upper lip and my nose that was being quite productive. I guess the force of the impact tore the skin open. Also, my braces did quite a number on the inside of my upper lip. My teeth were hurting quite a bit, but they were all there, and all still in the right position.

Shortly after the police showed up, Laura and Kate, two other students in my dorm, came upon me while walking home, and started helping with the information exchange. This was fortunate, as I wasn't thinking terribly clearly at that stage, and due to the massive swelling of my upper lip, I was barely intelligible in English, let alone Japanese. An ambulance was called for, and after establishing that a Japanese-only hospital was fine, I got a one-minute ride up the last hill before getting home, to the Utano Hospital. I thought this was pretty funny, because with as long as it took for the ambulance to be called for, get there, figure out what was going on, and deliver me, I could have walked there. It was something like 100 meters from where I crashed.

I got two stitches on the laceration below my nose and one in my upper lip, with tap to hold the other parts of the cut closed. My lip, since it was shredded in a particularly wonderful fashion, was the recipient of a snip for a dangling chunk. That took a long time to stop bleeding. After the cleanup, I got a CT scan to make sure there weren't any breaks. Then the doctor dispensed some instructions, and I was free to pick up my prescriptions and go.

My total cost for the ambulance ride, ER treatment, and prescriptions was slightly less than US$60. This really makes the US health care system look like an awful joke. I can't see that kind of treatment at a US hospital being less than a four figures even after insurance, and probably over $10000 before insurance.

More good news in terms of insurance: the information reached me yesterday that the driver does have car insurance. Even though there wasn't anything I could have done about it, I am legally at fault (that's fair--she was stopped, it certainly wasn't her fault), so the damage is on my bill. But now at worst I'll have to pay an insurance deductible. The way it was phrased when I heard it, though, I don't know if there even is a deductible. I'll find out more on Monday, when I go in to the police station for paperwork regarding the insurance. That should be fun.

I'll be meeting with the driver on the 28th this month. That's when all the payment details will get fully worked out. I'll be going with at least one person from the International Center at Ritsumeikan to help with the language barrier. My main job will be to apologize. That might sound weird to most Americans, since I got stuffed into an ambulance and she didn't get hurt, but the fact is that she didn't do anything, and then suddenly she had to deal with a damaged car, talking to a big, bleeding, and probably accidentally rude gaijin, and an afternoon full of talking with police and otherwise not doing what she had planned to do.

Anyway, I'm recovering pretty well. By the next day it didn't hurt any more, and I've just been needing more rest than normal. Today the swelling is mostly gone, so I look almost normal except for the cut. It did put a noticeable dent in my studies this week, and I'm struggling to work up the motivation to get back on track with that. But, things could have gone a lot worse, and I'm glad they didn't.