The Upside of Falling Down…

In my 60 years of riding motorcycles, I have had four serious crashes, any of which might have taken me out permanently. But for the grace of God or whoever pulls our strings in this life existence, I have survived them all to date.

1. Riding a troublesome CB450 in downtown San Diego, a college student pulled out from a parking spot and did a U-turn in front of me. I hit the left rear quarter panel and the bike and I hit the ground very hard. I tried to get back up, but noticed that my right foot was at a very unusual angle to the rest of my leg, so I just stayed down until help arrived. The end result was a compound-fractured tibia and broken femur. The femur was stabilized with a long steel rod and the tibia was secured in a full-length leg cast. The steel rod was removed a couple of years later.

2. The BIG ONE. Winding down the end of a 6-hr. endurance race at Ontario Motor Speedway, I rear-ended another bike which had slowed suddenly and drifted down in my path, just as I was looking at a pit sign saying that there were 20 minutes left to go. That crash red-flagged the race and I got a helicopter ride to Loma Linda Hospital. My right arm was broken in three places, The upper humerous bone was broken in two spots, which were secured by two long screws in the upper break and a plate and screws for the lower break. The ulna bone was broken just below the wrist. Due to a nearby open wound, the doctors delayed surgery until the wound healed up. In 3 weeks, the follow-up x-rays showed the bone moving back to where it belonged and was fusing rapidly. Doctors said to just leave it in the cast and it healed all on its own. That crash ended my racing hobby, but I fixed the race bike and swapped it for a CBX 6-cylinder super bike.

3. Having met a woman at a nightclub on NYE in 1982, I offered to take her for a motorcycle ride on NYD. I was unaware that the recent storms left black ice on the roads leading to the town Julian. As I followed a slow-moving car, it pulled off to the side of the road and I veered towards the centerline, shifted down a gear and applied power. The rear end fishtailed wildly and the bike started to go down on the left side. I instinctively tried to outrigger the bike with my extended left leg, but the black ice prevented any kind of countermeasure and we went down, sliding across the roadway into the path of oncoming cars. When I tried to stand up, my left knee collapsed. Passersby, including a nurse, helped me to the side of the road and someone found a long branch and some rags to stabilize my leg. My shaken passenger was uninjured apart from a hole worn in her boot. A CHP car came by and loaded me up into the back seat, tben took me up to the Ranger station where we contacted my passenger’s brother who drove his truck up, loaded up the KZ550 and both of us, then took me to the hospital and left the bike at my house. The diagnosis was a torn ACL and PCL ligament. Surgery followed with the ligaments reattached and my leg back into a full-length leg cast. I sold the bike, while still in a cast. The only real damage was a scuffed dyno cover, which I replaced.

4. The “last” one. In mid-March of 2025 I was riding with my Jamuligan friends, returning from a nice breakfast at the local casino. As we returned towards home, I was second in line of the four of us, riding down the two-late road in Harbison Canyon. George was leading the pack and I was second in line, with two more a ways behind me. As I was descending down the canyon, I reacted to the sight of an ugly Nissan car which had intruded into the oncoming lane and appeared to be heading straight for my front wheel. I instinctively grabbed a big handful of front brake and the wheel locked up, low-siding the bike and me down the road at about 45 mph. It was an instant of earth-sky-earth and the bike and I slid to a stop in the roadway. My two riding buddies, who were trailing behind me about 100 yards back, arrived at the scene of me and the bike lying on the ground, with no signs of the car that triggered my response. I was down for the count and my friends, plus some local neighbors all came to my rescue. My friend Steve called 911 and the local fire department arrived within minutes.

Steve and Keith both wrestled my bike upright and off to the side of the road, as I was being attended to. The bike’s seat had been torn off the bike, the shift lever was bent downwards, and the foot of the centerstand was folded inwards. Both of the handlebar levers were broken, and the quarter fairing had a large scuff mark on the left side.

I was up, sitting on a cement wall, trying to sort out what had just occurred. The EMTs got me onto a gurney and loaded up into the ambulance for a trip to the Trauma department at Sharps Hospital, about 20 miles away. I had slipped into shock, so I just tried to keep quiet with my eyes closed during the bumpy ride and was transferred to the hospital trauma department. They gave me a CAT scan from head to foot and discovered that my right thumb was broken, but nothing else was damaged to any degree. My brother was called to come down from Mira Mesa to gather me up and take me home about five hours later.

My thumb was repaired with surgery a week later by use of a plate and a half dozen little screws. During the surgery, my heart rate had spiked to 135 bpm, which is way up from my normal 60bpm. When I came out of surgery and into recovery, the nurse said that she had seen a lot of patients come out of surgery with high bpm rates and then they subsided the next day. Mine followed that pattern, but the cardiology team at the VA was alerted and put me through numerous tests before I was discharged from the hospital. They applied a heart monitor to my left side chest and I was told to keep track of any unusual heart rhythms for a two-week period. I was never aware of any kind of irregular heartbeats during that time, however.

A few days after the heart monitor was returned to the lab, I got a distressing message from my primary care doctor:

Patient had a min HR of 49 bpm, max HR of 211 bpm, and avg HR of 73 bpm.

Predominant underlying rhythm was Sinus Rhythm. 2 NSVT runs occurred, the run

with the fastest interval lasting 6 beats with a max rate of 169 bpm, the

longest lasting 14 beats with an avg rate of 119 bpm. Atrial Flutter occurred

(<1% burden), ranging from 82-211 bpm (avg of 131 bpm), the longest lasting 1

hour 25 mins with an avg rate of 138 bpm. Isolated SVEs were rare (<1.0%),

These are not good numbers for the long-lived human being….

I was never aware of anything unusual in my heart rate at all. My previous checkups and even some EKG tests were inconclusive until this accident. A prescription of Metoprolol is forthcoming and I will have some follow-up appointments with the Cardiology department. I don’t know how long this has been going on, but it appears that the unforeseen benefit from crashing my beloved Hawk GT650 is that I may have a few more years of health and well-being. I hadn’t planned on an early check-out, but this gives me some confidence that my heart problems will be contained and monitored into the future. I guess you can call it an extended warranty event.

With gratitude, even from crashing my bike…

Bill Silver aka MrHonda

www.vintagehonda.com