…Is Measured In Milliseconds
J. Lee Austin, MD
Some of you may be wondering why the fixation on “close calls” in my life story. To this very legitimate question I may answer by using another term for these events … Near Death Experiences. Proximity to death seems to have a way of forging a focus on Life, like nothing else can do, I would imagine. Peeking into the abyss changes how things look from there … forever.
J. Lee is a contributor to Crystal Beach Local News, and is the founder of The Good Help Network, a reader-supported publication.
I have had a number of these, the first of which y’all read about last week … The Great Crane Crash that came within a frog hair of squishing your author like a bug on a shoe. To this day I give all cranes a wide berth. Even the whooping kind.
The next brush with the grim reaper is burned in memory so well that I can still see it crystal clearly, even after all the decades. Surviving this one (also in Nacogdoches) I owe to my Peripheral Vision, without which I am certain I would have perished then and there on the tarmac. Ditto for instantaneous human motor reflexes.
Clamping down hard on the hand brakes of both Harley and Davidson, I stopped on a dime … just in time to see the car blurred by highway speed, lock ‘em up. Frozen in the well-known time warp moment, I watched in horror from my cat-bird seat, the slow motion spectacle of a vehicle screeching by just in front me … so close I could have touched up her mascara.
After her tire-blistering white knuckle stop, a few seconds of shock ticked by as we both sat there stationary like bricks in the wall, while time stood still in a cloud of acrid, burnt rubber smoke. Once we realized that we were both still alive, we remembered to breathe and slowly proceeded on our separate ways … ever so carefully. Hello there, wake-up call number two.
Motorcycles take top spot for bringing me the most NDE’s. The next one occurred in Lubbock on an otherwise boring afternoon, when the wonder of peripheral vision once again snatched my bacon from the eternal fire. Figuratively of course, I’m a good boy, ask anyone.
As I braked hard and swerved starboard, the driver of the VW Beetle instinctively diverted hard to port. The serenity of the residential neighborhood was violently shattered when my bike did a broadside smash, imploding her windows and demolishing the entire side of the heretofore cute German import.
My Honda 250 XL went careening on down the street without me. Yours truly got gobsmacked straight to the asphalt, inexplicably bouncing right back up into a vertical position, standing there confused and thoroughly dazed in the midst of the intersection. With the breath freshly knocked out, I was making a gasping growling sound on inspiration that completely freaked out the driver, who frantically called 911 and laid me on the sidewalk, adjacent to the lovely corner lawn where her smoldering wreck was now illegally parked.
Must have been a dozen different people in the emergency room ask me if I had ever had high blood pressure before. It really got annoying but they were just super concerned. In their defense, they didn’t realize just how close I had come to being sliced into street-side charcuterie.
I guess we all learned that day that an existential level, situational hypertension is the body’s normal and natural response to almost getting dead. And that high blood pressure is way better than no blood pressure.
So, the message is clear … ride thee not the Motorcycle, nor the Murder-cycle, nor the Donor-cycle. A quick internet search of “motorcycle accidents” may bring to mind that old sarcasm, “Buy your son a motorcycle. For his last birthday.” Ain’t worth it. Just say no.
Here’s to life, my bonus life delivered twice more,
~~ j ~~
“Anybody can jump a motorcycle. The trouble begins when you try to land it.” ~~ Evel Knievel
