Can't Shake that Feeling.....

Katydid and I have long had some of the same freaky experiences. Once when she flew to Cocoa Beach, Florida, to see Nurse Jane and watch the space shuttle lift off, she fainted eight seconds before liftoff and missed the whole thing. For no apparent reason. Also for no apparent reason, I fainted the same morning. We haven't had the same experiences with Nurse Jane, probably because she is way too normal to participate in our weirdness. Someone has to be sane enough to direct the men in the white coats when they come to get us.

Yesterday morning was another of those experiences. I had set my alarm for 5:00 to get to the bike ride by 8:00. [Cyclists in general must be psycho to get up at 5:00 AM on SATURDAY, drive 100 miles, ride a bicycle 68 miles for a t-shirt and a post-ride beer meal, then drive 100 miles back home, sweaty, tired, and sore.] I woke up one time at 3:32 and was relieved that I had another hour and a half to sleep.

Then I heard someone say my name. It woke me up, and I jumped so violently that I pulled something in my back just a little bit. "Yeah?" I replied, glancing at the clock. It was 4:47. In that fleeting moment of thought in which I wondered why someone was calling my name, I thought I had overslept and Katydid was outside calling my name. That is completely illogical, since Katydid wasn't coming here. We usually meet at a park-n-ride so she doesn't have to drive all the way to my house. It was also illogical to think that Katydid would stand outside and say my name, since our bedroom is upstairs and our front door is rarely locked. But please don't come burgle us.

My jumping and answering a call that wasn't there woke Hubby up, but he didn't respond. If he had, it probably would have been along the lines of, "Why the hell are you waking ME up just because YOU are going on a bicycle ride?"

It was the freakiest thing. I heard that voice. It was a female voice, and it said my first name. IT WOKE ME UP, for crying out loud. All day long yesterday, I couldn't shake that weird feeling that someone had said my name at 4:47 yesterday morning. On the bright side, I was able to turn off the alarm so it wouldn't wake Hubby up. My thrashing and muttering notwithstanding.

UPDATE ON THE INJURED MAN: I sent a text message to the ride organizer last night telling her to let me know if she heard anything about the condition of the man injured in yesterday's bicycle ride. I woke up this morning with the strongest feeling that he had died. But she had texted me back, and she said he was apparently going to be okay. She said CT scans were fine and he didn't appear to have any internal injuries. I am so relieved. Okay, maybe Nurse Jane DOES share in some of these freaky things. She has the same last name as the man injured on the ride yesterday.

A Sobering Moment.....

Today I did a bike ride with Katydid and Rozmo, one of our favorite rides called the Beautiful Backroads Century. It IS beautiful (possibly the loveliest route we do all year), they ARE back roads, and you don't HAVE to do a century. It also begins and ends at a Budweiser brewery about 2 hours from us, and that has nothing to do with the title of this post.

We were struggling a little at the end, as we typically do on long rides. At least I do. It's hot, I'm tired, and the 66-mile route that we chose to do has morphed into a 68-mile route. Those two miles may not seem like a lot, and the logical (and rational) response would be, "If you can ride 66 miles, surely you can ride two more." At that point in the day we are neither logical nor rational.

We became aware of this fact as we kept expecting the last rest stop to appear. On top of its stubborn refusal to appear on the horizon, I was out of water. And we were getting score updates on the UGA football game that weren't promising. Actually toward the end they WERE promising, but the promise evaporated on an Arkansas 40-yard pass with :14 left in the game. Poof. But I digress.

We finally realized we were just about at the rest stop, at the bottom of a nice downhill and around a curve. When we rounded the curve, we saw a cyclist down who was being attended to by other cyclists. Unfortunately, that's not an uncommon sight, and I figured he must have lost control coming around the curve and down the hill. Then I realized they were performing CPR on him.

Witnesses reported that he didn't wreck first; he just keeled over. Naturally there were a lot of injuries that occurred AFTER he fell, but the initial problem wasn't a wreck. They had been doing CPR for about 10 minutes when we arrived, and it didn't look good. Eventually he started breathing, but it was labored. He could tell them his name but not how old he was. They couldn't find any identification on his bike. (Note to family: I have a Road ID tag hanging on my bike. I plan to get the bracelet kind as well.)

EMS arrived fairly quickly, and we got ready to leave. That's when we realized they were taking him in the ambulance to a spot where a helicopter could land. We were right next to some pasture land, so it was good that we were out in the country.

He appeared to be riding alone, so I called one of the ride organizers so she could look up his emergency contact information. She called me back to ask if I were sure about his name (as sure as I could be, hearing it from a semi-conscious, badly injured man), and she said it appeared his wife was also on the ride, but riding a shorter route. I wasn't sure what else she wanted to know because I couldn't hear over the sound of the life flight helicopter.

I've never seen CPR in action before. I suppose I've seen a fair number of injured cyclists, but none bleeding as badly as this man was. I wasn't sure I could get back on that bike and ride the last 10 miles.

Suddenly football scores, heat, the pain in my legs, my extreme thirst, and my exhaustion weren't nearly as important as they had been half an hour earlier.

I hope that man is all right.