More than 25 years after a life-changing motorcycle crash, Langford resident Lori Black found herself thumbing through the Gazette archives this week, looking for a copy of the paper that showed her sprawled on her back on the cold asphalt.
“There’s not a day I don’t think of it,” she said. But she refuses to let that day break her positive spirit as she reflects on how it impacted her life – and still does to this day.
Riding on the back of a motorcycle with her husband, the pair had spent the morning in Sidney at a fundraiser and were traveling on Happy Valley Road for another event with about 30 other motorcycles behind them on that September day back in 1990.
They saw the car pull out of a parking lot in front of them, but didn’t have enough time to avoid the collision.
“We slammed on the brakes and went into a real bad fishtail,” she said. To this day, she still has flashbacks of that moment. She can see the car approaching in slow motion, sees the bike sliding into the side of the vehicle, but the image stops there.
“The impact grabbed my boot and my foot and tore all the flesh off,” she said, reliving the moment as she describes it. The force of hitting the car broke all the bones in her left foot, threw her from the bike, and saw her land on her back.
As fate would have it, an emergency room nurse lived nearby and was one of the first on scene. The nurse was bent over Black when she regained consciousness, trying to keep her calm. But Black isn’t the type to take a situation laying down and wanted to see what she was up against so she could face it head on. Against the advice of the nurse, she stole a peek at her foot. What she saw was unrecognizable.
She doesn’t remember much of her 40-day stay in the hospital. There was one somewhat lucid moment that first night, when she came to in the ER, through the drug-induced haze. She remembers taking another look at her foot, but doesn’t remember much of the next 20 days.
“It was long, tedious. Lots of skin grafts … Unfortunately, the skin grafts wouldn’t take on my foot,” she said with a pause. Still uncertain if her local team of doctors would be able to save her foot, she wrote to the Indianapolis 500 surgeon she had read about in an article. He happened to be in Vancouver a short time later and arranged a consultation. He found her another American doctor to perform a new surgery in Victoria, but promised to fly her down to the States and do the surgery himself if the other doctor was unable.
Black shows off the scar that runs from her left shoulder to her elbow and tells how that doctor removed muscle and artery and implanted it in her left foot to build her a new heel. Now that foot’s a size larger than her right and she can no longer wear high-heeled shoes. At the time, she remembered, that was a real blow – she jokes she had just bought a new collection of high heels at a sale.
But for the young mother of a two-and-a-half-year-old, it wasn’t the loss of shoes that made the crash so devastating.
“It was very hard. I had a little girl that I couldn’t look after.” She remembers how hard her husband had to work to keep the household together while she was confined to a wheelchair for two years, before slowly transitioning to crutches, then a walker and then canes. “It was very hard on the relationship.”
A bartender at the Langford Legion in her 20s at the time of the crash, the young mom loved working. Not being able to do that was a major shock for her. “It’s very hard to go from a normal body to an injured body,” she said. “I would give anything – they could take all that money back – to be able to work again.”
Even though the driver of the car was deemed to be at fault, Black said it still took six years to settle the case with ICBC.
“It’s been a struggle,” she said. She suffered from depression afterward and still has days when she doesn’t want to get out of bed.
But she credits her determination and positive attitude as factors that helped her get through it and still keep her going. Black also notes how incredible the support of her family was and still is. She even keeps in contact with a few of the hospital staff she got to know during her stay.
It’s that support that motivates her to help others as much as she can. Still unable to work, she spends a fair bit of time helping seniors in her Langford neighbourhood.
“I don’t have a lot to give, but I do what I can.” She helps neighbours by driving them around, cooking, doing what little yard work she can, and sometimes just helps provide another level of human interaction. “A lot of them are veterans and they don’t have anyone,” she adds.
Looking over the pictures of the accident she shudders. “It could have been a lot worse.”
Her heart sinks every time she sees a young person on a motorbike wearing flip flops or shorts. “You’ve got to wear the proper gear,” she said with emphasis.
Black was wearing some of the best boots available, as well other proper protective gear, “and they just crumpled like a Styrofoam cup.”
katie@goldstreamgazette.com