Life after a bad bike accident
A La Presse writer interviewed a young man who survived a bad bike accident last December on the Angrignon viaduct, in which he suffered a serious head injury despite his helmet, plus a broken femur. But he’s walking again and has resumed his work as an engineer.
MtlWeb 13:42 on 2022-04-09 Permalink
Truly an amazing story: a very lucky young man…his journey is a testament to the reasoning behind the wearing of a helmet.
Robert H 17:32 on 2022-04-09 Permalink
Bravo à Evan Marinacci et sa guérison miraculeuse. Il a eu de la chance et il le sait, mais je crois que c’etait le port du casque qui a fait la différence pour lui entre la vie et la mort. Je préférerais ne pas en porter moi-même, mais je pense aussi qu’il est plus sage d’en porter un, en parlant d’expérience. Compte tenu de la gravité de ses blessures, je trouve aussi son attitude remarquable : « Ça ne m’a pas traumatisé [!], affirme-t-il. Un jour, je serai capable d’en refaire. » Quel esprit extraordinaire !
Kate 18:38 on 2022-04-09 Permalink
It’s a safe bet that without the helmet he would not be alive today.
denpanosekai 23:21 on 2022-04-09 Permalink
Ooof. Angrignon after Newman is basically a voie de service. Extremely hostile to cyclists, in fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single one (I drive there a lot). There aren’t a lot of options between NDG and Lasalle. Really thankful he pulled through.
Meezly 09:35 on 2022-04-10 Permalink
Yes, amazing story about a lucky and resilient young man. Kudos to the surgeon who meticulously removed the bone splinters from his brain!
Orr 18:05 on 2022-04-10 Permalink
I have thoughts about this news story and people’s reactions to it regarding the “helmet saved his life” opinion many people hold and I believe this news story reinforces. If you don’t want your assumptions about of car-bike crashes to be challenged, perhaps just ignore this. (also it appears I wrote an essay and nobody reads essays any more.)
There is an opposing & research-based point of view that states that you’ll ride less safely when wearing a helmet.
This is based on the fact that although “everyone” believes the myth of total safety when you wear a helmet (based on media repeatedly presenting the car industry’s favourite victim-blaming myth of “he died ‘because’ he wasn’t wearing a helmet” as if it were a fact), the fact & reality is that a piece of foam on your head will not offer very much protection from death or brain injury caused from the very large impact forces incurred when hit by a car truck or bus.
Eliminating individual “mauvais habitudes” and avoiding unsafe locations/situations will keep you safer than a helmet ever will. As will building safe streets and gap-free-protected bike pane network.
But please, do go on about how “the helmet saved his life.”
Happy he got good medical treatment. Brain surgery and brain rehabilitation are incredible things.
Yes I wear a helmet on my bike.
Problem is for most people taking responsibility for personal safety on a bicycle starts and ends with wearing a helmet. No situational awareness. No risk assessment. No evaluation of alternative routes. No avoiding riding beside vehicles into intersections.
So much blithe trust in that magic foam bucket. I see a lot of that in these forums, educated people (many who do not even ride bicycles) believing they know all the facts about safety when half of these “facts” are the car industry victim-blaming PR that we’ve been fed for decades. It’s how industry PR works. Immoral as heck, but it works remarkably well at covertly feeding us our opinions.
New Jessie Singer book “There Are No Accidents: The Deadly Rise of Injury and Disaster—Who Profits and Who Pays the Price” goes into great detail about this.
Another point I’d like to present is that helmet laws & blaming victims for dying because they weren’t wearing a helmet is a cheap way used by anti-tax zealots, the car lobby, and copaganda proponents to keep cities from spending tax dollars to build a protected & gap-free bike lane network for safe active transport. (If cycling is perceived as unsafe then people buy more cars & gasoline)
Don’t you think that a protected bike lane would also have saved his life? How about eliminating the trend of everyone having mega-sized cars for personal transportation? How about cell phones simply don’t work inside cars? How about geo-zoned speed-limiters on cars & trucks so speed limit cannot be exceeded. Big fines for illegal left turns and for not using turn signals at intersections. All things we could do today if the political will existed at municipal/provincial/national level and at (pointing here with all my fingers) Transports Quebec.
Wear your helmet and take a cycling safety class. Happy spring everybody. It’s great to be alive.
Kate 22:01 on 2022-04-10 Permalink
Orr, I did not mean to issue a doctrinaire “helmets are good and will always save you” message as the media sometimes do. I know that idea is simplistic and excuses many problems.
I only meant that, given the nature of this man’s head injury, even while wearing protection, it seems likely he would not have survived had he not had a helmet on.
Meezly 09:48 on 2022-04-11 Permalink
I’ve stopped making general statements about how important is to wear bike helmet because there’s always someone who’s going to assume that I’m pushing the myth of total safety.
Last time I did, someone shared a San Antonio study making the argument that bike helmets don’t really protect you from bikevehicle collisions. I had to read through the study and figure out that that wasn’t what the study was about. Rather, one of its conclusions was that the bike helmet helps to mitigate the severity of an injury when an accident occurs. Kind of like what the vaccine does for Covid infections!
This is probably what happened to that young man. Wearing a helmet reduced the severity of his head injury and most likely helped him to recover.
The San Antonio study even observed that bike lanes don’t really do that much more to protect cyclists, but does this mean we should stop adding more bike lanes? No, because bike lanes help to make everyone aware that cyclists belong on the road too.
As a cyclist, the only defense I have against vehicular accidents is my level of experience and alertness, and being extra cautious. That’s it.
I’m not going to convince all cyclists to wear helmets but I’d still like to protect other cyclists who don’t wear them!. I understand that a helmet is not going to save me from being run over by a dump truck but again I don’t understand the downplaying of the importance of the helmet.
As cyclists, we need a combination of variables to protect ourselves: helmet, bike lanes, reduced speed limits, visibility, alertness, caution, etc. Omitting any one thing will only increase our chance of risk.
Meezly 11:56 on 2022-04-11 Permalink
I’d also be interested in seeing the research about how you’ll ride less safely when wearing a helmet. It obvs sounds contradictory, but for me, when I ride without a helmet for whatever reason, I do ride more cautiously on account for a lack of helmet, ie. taking side streets instead of main arteries, reducing my speed, being more aware…
But this also applies to me having a faulty brake, I’m still going to ride my bike until I get it fixed, but I’m not going to gun down the big Ave du Parc hill. Maybe not all cyclists do this, but I see my helmet as part of my bike, so if something is not optimal, I’d adjust how I ride.
Not ever speeding down a big hill is not feasible for me, that’s part of why I enjoy cycling. I’ll only ride fast if conditions are optimal, which includes having good weather, brakes and a sound helmet. I’m assessing my risk of riding faster, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m riding less safely.
So it’d be interesting to see what the criteria for riding less safely means in those studies.
dhomas 01:39 on 2022-04-12 Permalink
Anecdotal evidence time!
Several years ago in the summer of 2013, I had an accident with my bike. I was on my way to work on the “bike lane” (painted lines on the street) on Viger going west. At the intersection with Bleury, I saw the countdown for the pedestrian crossing was at around 3 seconds, so I sped up to not miss the light (3 seconds plus the yellow should have been enough time). I noticed, however, that the car in the far lane on Bleury was edging forward and didn’t seem to have its indicator on to show it was going to turn right onto Viger. I suspected the motorist wanted to pull ahead of all other traffic to get into the more central lane going South on Bleury and might have “cheated” the red light to do so. So, I braked very suddenly. I had changed my brakes the day prior, so I hadn’t yet adjusted and was used to squeezing very hard to get my brakes to work better. It was also raining that day. My back wheel didn’t quite stop (I think it may have hydroplaned due to the water on the road), but my front wheel definitely did. So for the first time ever, I went over my handlebars. I’m pretty sure my helmet saved me from more serious injury (I “only” separated my shoulder). The helmet had a good sized crack in it and I remember thinking that could have been my head.
Had I collided with that vehicle, I probably wouldn’t have been so lucky (they did end up doing exactly what I thought they would, though I didn’t notice if they burned the red to do it). But for accidents not involving motor vehicles, I’m pretty sure helmets do help. They won’t protect you from everything, but it’s better to have all chances on your side, IMO.