It Could Have Been A Lot Worse (update from 2008)

So there  are  Baron and myself at a happier moment sitting among the wild geraniums in the spring of 2008. A few weeks before this photo the big guy  and I crashed and burned as I was racing downhill on my bike and he decided to catch a rabbit that had cut in front of me on the road. Over the handlebars I went onto the blacktop after slamming one the brakes and crashing into Baron. He kept going after the bunnies and was a little late in coming back to see if I survived.  Lassie he was not.  A visit to Urgent Care in Rochester showed that I had nothing broken to go along with my head gash, scrapped arm, sore neck,  sprained shoulder, hip pointer and bruised left leg. Reading Boulder Colorado's newpaper this morning I decided it could have been a lot worse.......

Colorado bicyclist took a tumble Tuesday after colliding with a black bear.
Tim Egan was training for the upcoming Triple Bypass Bike Race when the bear darted out in front of him on a country road near Boulder.
Egan and his nephew estimate they were traveling at about 45 miles per hour on the hill just west of Boulder when the collision occurred.
Neither one could believe what happened.
"I saw a blur and thought to myself, 'Big dog.' Then just as I was hitting it, I saw this gigantic bear head with huge teeth. He was surprised to see me and I was surprised to see him. It was almost like a cartoon when we collided," Egan said.
Egan and his bike were thrown through the air.
Egan's breath was knocked out and he was afraid he'd broken his back.
He couldn't move for several minutes.
His nephew pulled up on the scene just seconds later and told him the bear was still there.
"I remember thinking to myself, 'I'm alive, but the bear's here. Oh, this is bad,'" Egan said. "I mean, this bear was as high as my waist. He was extremely well-fed and a big guy. And he wasn't happy. He looked at me and he opened his mouth."
Eventually the bear sauntered off into the woods, apparently uninjured.
Egan, though, was bleeding profusely and his bike was bent.
He and his nephew got it straightened out and rode to Boulder Community Hospital.

And so now eight years later it's been time to pay the piper.  A benign head tremor and "calming" pills the calmed me so well I had a of number vertigo episodes,  an undiagnosed, at the time of injury,  broken collarbone, traction on the neck a.k.a. they strap your head to a machine and try to pull it off., too many shoulder x-rays and MRI's to count and now finally shoulder surgery to relieve or fix two paragraphs worth of  abnormal , torn  arthritic, not normal, spurring, diffuse shoulder, parts most of which I've never heard of before.
Maybe I was wrong those many years ago.  Running into a three hundred pound bear might not necessarily have been worse.

 Me, my bike, my sling and Miss Lily discussing why biking together is no longer an option.