How I Would Have Died--If I Lived 100 Years Ago: Bicycle Racing

Latest post on my work blog:

On Wednesday, May 9, 2007, twelve riders (including me) started down a 3/4-mile winding descent known as Turkey Hill. If you live in the Northeast, you probably have eaten Turkey Hill ice cream. It's that Turkey Hill—a real place on the west side of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Turkey Hill is a coasting race; no pedaling allowed. Riders sweep down the hill crouched as low as they can get on their bikes, passing each other using the momentum of the draft. On that lovely spring afternoon, I started at the back of the group and picked off the riders one or two at a time as we went faster and faster down the hill.

Just before nearing the finish line, I swept left to pass the lead rider. I timed it perfectly—except that the lead rider moved left. We touched wheels. I remember less than two minutes of the next three days.

When two-wheeled vehicles touch wheels, the back rider crashes. According to the ten riders behind me, I flipped through the air and landed on my head and right shoulder, sliding into the ditch at the base of the hill.

By my count,  I would have died four different ways 100 years ago. In order of severity:

1) I broke cervical vertebra 1 and 2 and smashed C-7. 100 years ago, spinal injury victims survived for weeks or months at best.

2) My high-tech bicycle helmet was crushed and covered with blood, but intact. Without it I might have been dead before I was done sliding without the bike.

3) Within 30 minutes after the accident I was in a MEDEVAC helicopter on the way to the Trauma Center at Lancaster General Hospital. With a smashed vertebra, I could have been quadraplegic or worse before I got the hospital by any slower means.

4) When I landed, my racing glasses dug into my forehead, peeling it up about two inches and ripping the skin from the bridge of my nose. Plastic surgery put me back together. Without it, infection could very well have been fatal.

This does not mean I got off scot-free. Stay tuned for next week's post, when I explain how modern medicine healed my spinal injuries.

New "How I Would Have Died" post

Today's post in my new series about how I would have died if I lived 100 years ago:  http://www.chemheritage.org/community/periodic-tabloid/2010-11-26-how-i-would-have-died.aspx

I hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving--or just a good Thursday if you live in another country.

How I Would Have Died--If I Lived 100 Years Ago

[The following post is on the blog Periodic Tabloid. I will be writing weekly about how I would have died if I lived 100 years ago.]

In honor of Veteran’s Day, which was yesterday, let me explain how I could have died at 9:30 a.m. on November 9, 1973 had it been 1873 instead:

I enlisted in the Air Force in January 1972. After eight months of school I was assigned to Hill Air Force Base in Utah. My job was live-fire testing of missiles. We were 8,000 miles from the war in Vietnam, but several days a week we bolted rockets into test -firing rigs and set them off.

Our job was officially aging and surveillance testing. We froze missiles, heated them, shook them in 750,000-watt machines, put them in altitude chambers and humidity chambers, then fired them.

Most of the missiles burned just as they are supposed to. Occasionally, the mistreatment we gave them caused the propellant to crack. The air gap could make the missile explode rather than burn. We hated that. When a missile blew up a test pad we would get behind schedule and be out on the range longer. Some actually worried about the concrete and steel raining on the bunker we waited in—mostly the older guys. The single airmen, most under the age of 20, only worried about their weekend plans.

On Friday, November 9, 1973, we were testing inter-stage detonators on a Minuteman 3-stage missile—the kind that carry several warheads across the poles to the other side of the world. Back then they were aimed at Russia and China.

In a multi-stage missile, detonator cord separates the stages. When the first stage burns out, the detonator cord burns through the skin allowing the spent stage to fall away before the next stage fires. I was connecting test wires to the detonators when I saw a blue-white flash and flew back against the wall of the test bay.

I stood up and saw my crew chief lying on the floor. I could see, but I could not blink and my vision was tinted red. A wire was sticking out of my right eye, holding it open. The first two fingers of my right hand were hanging at a strange angle. Bits of wire, screws, and aluminum from the test clamp peppered my body from my waist up.

After six eye operations and surgery to reattach my fingers, I recovered months later. If the same accident happened 100 years ago, infection would have left me blind, or dead. And without the high-tech eye surgeons who cleared their schedule to operate on me, I would have been blind just from the injuries.

Modern medicine depends on chemistry. Not just drug development, but the materials that make high-tech surgery possible and the instruments that make labs so accurate and efficient.