July 17 started off no different than any other summer day. I woke up at 8 a.m., got ready for work, and made myself some breakfast. I made sure I had my calendar, laptop, and lunch in my backpack. That morning, my plan was ride my bike to teach guitar lessons at my first job, and then head back to SMU to work at my other job in Meadows School of the Arts.

The final part of my process to leave the house was to strap on my extremely unattractive and tacky helmet. The reason I felt so lame in the helmet was because even though I had purchased it almost a year prior, I hadn’t started wearing the helmet until that very week. There was no particular force that inspired me to wear my helmet after all that time of letting it gather dust; I had seen it laying around and decided to make good use of it. Little did I know, that day my helmet would save my life.

I put my helmet on, grabbed my bike and realized I had left my sunglasses inside. I was in a bit of a hurry, so I decided against wasting time grabbing the sunglasses, and started on my way.

My usual route was to take SMU Boulevard to cross the 75

and get to Dyer Street, where the studio I teach at is located. But since SMU Boulevard was closed for the summer, I had to take the Mockingbird crossover. I had taken this route every day and never had an issue.

As I made my way across the pedestrian crosswalk over the access road, I made sure that the driver who had stopped in the only lane that exists there saw me. He did, so I began to cross.

Then, a bicyclist’s worst nightmare: a truck driver, paying no attention to the law or the fact that he was creating a lane where a lane did not exist, whipped around the car who stopped to let me cross. I had one split second before I was thrown off my bike to realize what was happening. When I saw myself flying toward his back left tire, I closed my eyes.

I remember no sounds. I don’t remember how I landed. I don’t know where my precious bike ended up in the street. I remember nothing but opening my eyes, being on my back, and thinking, ‘Where are my glasses? Where are my glasses?’ I reached out to the street around me, panicking, and realized, ‘I didn’t wear my glasses today.’ These simple thoughts were all I could process. (Side note: if I had worn my sunglasses that day, I’d still be picking glass out of my face.)

Then I realized cars were honking at me. Cars were honking at me to get out of the road. I got up and felt my body start to wake up. My wrists hurt. My elbows hurt. My shoulder felt slightly burned. And my face felt very strange.

The summary of the accident was this: the truck driver wasn’t paying attention to where he was going. He hit my bike, and I flew off of my bike and was propelled onto the ground. My head probably hit his tire before it hit the asphalt, and I had a concussion. I sprained both of my wrists. I had road rash on my face, elbows, shoulder and legs. My face became so swollen that later at the emergency room I had to have multiple CT scans to make sure my brain wasn’t swollen and I didn’t fracture any facial bones. The swelling behind my left eye made that eye unable to focus

The amazing thing about this day is that my even though my head was the first thing to hit the ground, I walked away with no permanent damage. My helmet caught the majority of the blow and it saved my life. I’m writing this article for The Daily Campus in hope that anyone who reads it realizes that although helmets are tacky, they do exactly what they are designed to do.

No matter how safe of a driver you may be on your bike, the people around you aren’t used to looking out for cyclists. Protect yourself. Drive defensively. Wear a helmet.

Katrina Leshan is a junior majoring in guitar performance. She can be reached for comment at [email protected].