Safety Matters: #canyouseemenow

This article is a little outside the normal scope of TwoWheelsOrMore but it covers a subject which is very close to my heart for personal reasons (ones that I will share along the way). My employer is running a campaign for motorcycle safety which you may have seen titled #canyouseemenow. One of the greatest dangers facing motorcyclists for many years has been motorists emerging from side roads into their path and that’s still the case today as it has been for years. Campaigns like this and Think Bike help increase driver awareness for motorcyclists but we can always do more. If the campaign helps save one life by making a driver think twice about what he’s doing then it will have done its job (hopefully it will do more than that) and if sharing my story below helps achieve that then I’m happy to help.

One thing I do need to confirm is that any opinions expressed in this article are my own personal views and do not necessarily represent the views of my Minster Law Solicitors or the #canyouseemenow campaign.

INTRODUCTION

My personal experience with this subject does not come as a motorcycle rider. It surprises many considering the amount of writing I do about my love for motorcycle racing that I’m not a rider myself and in fact never have been. I’ve only actually controlled a motorcycle once which was literally five minutes on an off-road bike many moons ago and when you hear my tale it may make you understand why.

This article is difficult for me to write and may be a difficult read, I’m not sure. My mother had a motorcycle accident when I was nine years old which left her disabled and changed my childhood and life forever. I’ve only ever discussed these events a couple of times in the last 34 years (would you believe I’ve never even been through the whole story with my wife?) as my memory has protected my brain with a lot of walls. As a result I have to think hard to recall some of these facts and on a day to day basis I do struggle to remember a lot of my childhood. I think I put this all in a safe place to get to dealing with mentally later and never really got around to it. The intention is not to put any motorcyclists off riding (I’m sure I couldn’t do that anyway) or make their families worry more (I’m sure they already do). The intent is to make that driver at the junction think once more “am I sure there is nothing coming?”

The attitude of car drivers towards bikers can often be very negative. They don’t like the way motorcycles can filter in traffic and that they can overtake easily on roads when cars cannot. I see too many drivers edging to the right and the centre of the road when a motorcycle approaches from the rear to pass rather than easing to the left to let them pass like I do. Maybe part of that attitude enters a driver’s head at a junction sometimes too I don’t know. I’m not saying anyone ever pulls out in front of a motorcycle on purpose but that maybe their brain is not programmed to double check. I do believe there are drivers out there with the attitude that bikers are “speed freaks”, ride like “maniacs” and are “asking for it”. That needs to stop. The reason I write this piece is so that drivers can see that even if any of the above were true the impact of an accident can reach much further than its physical victim. There are families whose lives lay as shattered as the bones of any injured rider.

What I will confirm first is that my mother’s motorcycle accident did not happen in the scenario that the campaign is aimed at. In fact the true cause is not known for sure. All the same I believe that the subsequent events fit the need for the story to be told here. It may even be therapeutic for me to tell it one more time.

I’ve waffled enough to avoid the inevitable and now it’s time to get to the hard bit. Do me a favour though. If you’re a parent give your child a hug hope that they never have to go through this be it because of a motorcycle accident or something similar.

THE DAY OF THE ACCIDENT

It’s mid-morning in September 1981 and I’m nine years old in the playground at Junior School not long after starting what we then called Third Year. I was playing something with friends but I don’t remember what – that’s lost to the sands of time rather than stored behind a mind wall no doubt. My teacher Mrs Judd shouted me over to her and asked me to come inside with her. As we went back into the school and walked down the corridor she held my hand which I thought was rather odd. Rather than go to the classroom she took me to the reception area where the officers were and there was my dad talking to another teacher. Again, very odd and I went from thinking I was in trouble for something to a dawning realisation of something not being right. As a child of a parent riding a motorcycle even at nine years old you develop a heightened awareness that something could go wrong.

Just to put a bit of meat on the bones regarding the motorcycle in question my mum had a Honda C90. Back then Honda did a 90cc bike which was something between moped and motorcycle and maxed out at around 60mph. I don’t think she’d had it long, perhaps less than a year after she’d passed her test on a moped. Back in the 60’s mum was a Rocker in the old Mods vs Rockers era and had two boyfriends killed on motorcycles (both by lorries if I recall) and that had put her off of having one. My dad was a driver through and through – loved his cars and drove a HGV for a living. I don’t know what changed her mind other than wanting a bit of independence maybe once you get to that stage where as a housewife with a husband at work and a son at school you have time to kill. The summer before the accident we’d been to the east coast and stayed at my aunt’s cottage in Hummanby if I remember correctly (I say that a lot don’t I?) which is another memory that only came back the other day when I took my family for a trip to Flamborough Head and came back past the small holiday village. For a week my mum and I rode around Filey, Scarborough, Bridlington etc and I loved being a pillion rider.

Anyway, back to school. I can’t remember anything specific about dad’s demeanour or if he told me at this stage that she’d been in an accident. Perhaps still a solid wall there if anyone knows a good hypnotist. We drove to my nan’s house (on my mum’s side) and I remember thinking on the way that I wondered if she had fallen on one of the roads on the way where the road was still gravelly after re-surfacing as I know how treacherous it was for my bicycle let alone a motorcycle. My next memory is being in my Nan’s living room when my dad told her what had happened. I think actually I’d asked my dad and he’d said he’d tell me when we got there. He said that my mum had been in an accident and was in hospital. He broke down in tears and said that they said she probably wasn’t going to live. Unlike me my dad was one of those stoic blokes who never cried so when that happens you know that things are really in a bad way. He needed Nan to look after me while he went to the hospital.

I found out many years later that dad was working on a HGV journey somewhere near Manchester when the police pulled him over. After the accident they’d tracked where he worked and got the registration of his lorry from the firm and tracked him down en route to his delivery. I can’t imagine being miles away from home, being pulled over by the police (probably thinking you’d done something wrong) and being told that your wife was critical in hospital following an accident.

We don’t really know what happened in the accident as my mum can’t remember and none of the witnesses fully saw it. There’s a bend near Garforth, Leeds which was notorious for accidents over a hump backed bridge called Charlie Sweeps corner and that’s where it happened. The layout is clearer with better visibility now not just due to this accident but numerous others. As mum came over the bridge and down towards the bend to the left something went wrong. We think the front wheel hit a sunken drain cover near the left side of the road which sent her off balance and out of control. Somehow as she reached the bend she was still trying to get control back and turn as she crossed into the oncoming lane. Straight into the front of a Ford Cortina. If she’d gone over the handlebars and over the car things might not have been so bad but she didn’t. Somehow she was caught at the front of the car as it lost control and went straight off the road and into a tree. Luckily two cars back was a police car which called for an ambulance. Some of this information is what we got from police and I’ve therefore learned over time and some is from minor snippets mum does recall.

She was in cardiac arrest when the ambulance arrived and also stopped breathing a couple of times on the way to St James Hospital, Leeds. Overall she died six times but I don’t remember which was in the ambulance and which was in theatre for sure. She’d suffered a totally smashed pelvis, a broken right femur and worst of all had a severed aorta. She was in the operating theatre a long time with a bleak forecast.

At Nan’s we waited for her partner (my grandpa died a few years before) to pick us up to go to the hospital. Once there we went to A&E and were led to a small private waiting room where my dad was. Again there are only little memories here. If we got there at midday then we were there a good ten hours as we certainly didn’t leave until late night. Mostly we just sat and waiting for news and I have no idea how they kept a worried nine year-old occupied for that length of time. I know my Nan took me for a walk around the hospital playing ‘follow the line’ as the floors had different coloured lines leading to different areas rather than just signs. By late night they told my dad to expect the worst. They could not repair the aorta and she was losing too much blood. All in all they used over sixty pints to get through the work that they’d done. She was given the last rites by a Catholic priest and was not expected to make it through the night. Somehow she did though and even her surgeon at the time, a very excellent man called Mr McWilliams, said he did not know how. She was in a coma and pretty broken into pieces but she lived.

AFTER THE ACCIDENT

She was out of the coma in a few days and not long after moved from the ICU to an orthopaedic ward. The list of injuries was pretty disturbing. Her right pelvis was so broken it was in so many pieces it could never be repaired or plated (if that’s medically possible). She had permanent paralysis in her left leg and the right leg had a break in the femur that was a distance apart. They’d put her legs in traction and (skip forward if you’re squeamish please) put screws through her thigh into the bones to keep them in place and minor adjustments ever so often intended on bringing the two broken ends of the bone back together. I’ve no idea if this is how they’d do it now but it was 1981. The screws were held in place by callipers that went all down the leg.

When I first went to see her after the accident I didn’t even recognise her. This is the tough stuff to write. Not even recognising your own mum. You kind of make in image in your own mind of what they’d look like but she wasn’t like it at all. She was yellow for a start. She’d got jaundice and looked completely different. I know her pelvis and left leg was in a plaster cast all the way down but I’m not sure about the right paralysed one. I can’t remember that and it’s not an important detail anyway. I was only able to see her for a short while as I think she was still in ICU at the time but not in the coma at that point. I’ve just remembered that I recorded tapes for her to listen to in the coma. Thankfully they’ve been lost somewhere in time but I know I’d never want to hear those. Hadn’t remembered that until now.

She was in hospital for around nine months and that was only her first stay there. While dad worked I stayed with friends after school until he got home. As a man of that era who was a HGV driver he’d never had to cook or look after me much and now he had to balance looking after me with working. It’s fairly common these days but not so back then. There were no microwavable ready meals just yet either so I grew up on a lot of beef burgers and sausages for a while. The reality soon dawned though that looking after me would not be the end of the story.

With so many irreparable injuries mum would need full time care when she came home. They eventually managed to pin and plate the left leg and got her to a point where she could walk with a zimmer frame and callipers on both legs for a short space of time. Her legs always had to be straight which is why she had callipers for that but even in bed she had a permanent cast in two piece of which the top/front (depending on your point of view) came off. For the most part of any day though she was confined to a bed as the pelvic injury prevented her from standing or sitting up for any length of time. When she came home from hospital dad gave up work as a driver and became a full time carer. We lived in a semi-detached house at the time and put a bed for her in the lounge which is where she would stay until we moved.

Eventually we moved to a bungalow converted by the council with a ramp for her wheelchair but not before something happened which meant that she would never walk again. The pin or plate in the left leg holding the bone together snapped. She went back into hospital and I can’t remember how long that was for but they said the break in the femur would not join back together so for years she had a removable cast on that leg all the time. Years later a surgeon came up with some new technique or technology and she had a further operation to put the bone back together. Nothing else would change, she’d never walk again and was still restricted in how long she could be out of bed due to her smashed pelvis but at least she didn’t have to wear the cast on the left leg and could wear jeans and trousers to go out.

For 35 years now she’s been in constant pain, mostly with the paralysed right leg, which has been treated with a number of pain killing medications to the point where even morphine is now ineffective when it’s at its worst. I know first-hand how heart breaking it is to see a loved one go through life in constant pain and it’s especially hard to come to terms with when you are a child and it’s your parent. Now that I have a degenerative back condition myself which has me in constant pain I am overly aware on the affect it has on my wife and eventually will on my sons. Seeing someone you love in pain when you are unable to help is one of the worst experiences in life.

EPILOGUE

I’m at the end of this tale now even though in terms of detail it’s only at the start of life over the last three and a bit decades. There’s not much more to tell really. As a child I was treated differently at school for a while but things soon went back to normal. I was picked on at school a lot but not because of the accident thankfully. Mum became a lot more protective over me through my childhood than other parents. I think what happened to her made her realise how fragile life can be and that it can change in an instant. As a result I was never able to go out without her knowing all the time where I was and when I would be home. That sounds standard practice now but in the 80s most parents were more laid back and as long as the kids were back for tea they didn’t really keep tabs on them.

I hope reading this has been of some use to you and I thank you for bearing with me if you made it this far. Mum’s disability was not caused by a driver pulling out on her like in the #canyouseemenow campaign but the after effects are the same as if it were. When I was a child we had the Green Cross Code for crossing roads which was to look right, look left and look right again. That last look to the right could save someone’s life if you do it when you’re pulling out of a junction. Remember if you hit a biker it’s not just their life you could be changing.

#General #RoadSafety