Watch out for telephone wires!

The other day I was went to the post office to pick up my weekly economist and check if I had any other surprises. It was a sunny day (pretty much all days between October and May are with varying degrees of hotness and haziness) around two in the afternoon with the sun just starting to make its decent towards the horizon – just low enough to escape the shield of my helmet’s short visor. I biked down one of the few paved roads and turned west onto the barren dirt road leading to the post office. I was cruising down the street at a fairly swift pace – just below full speed where you start to sweat but fast enough to get a good breeze going to cool you off. I suddenly felt a rapidly increasing pressure on the front of my neck just below my adams apple… the next instant I was off my bike and flying through the air! I’d been clotheslined!!! I’m talking clothesline straight out of a movie where the character is abruptly thrown backwards by an invisible force.

I can only imagine what it must have looked liked – me obliviously biking down the street when out of the blue I fly off my bike and crash onto the ground. Unfortunately, nobody was able to enjoy such an amazing incident, as the road was empty when I went down. I imagine I would have quite a popular YouTube video had it been on film.

A telephone line traversing the road had fallen off one of its poles and fell to rest on a six-foot wall below. This left the cord precariously strewn across the road at the perfect (or not so perfect) height to catch me on my neck as I rode by on my bike. It happened so fast – I literally had time to think: “oh, how strange, something is pushing on my neck” – WHAM! I’m in the air.

The cord slid up my neck till it reached the top of my throat where my head connects. Next, it forced my head backwards as it lifted up my chin and I was almost horizontal to the ground. Luckily, not only did I have my helmet on for the impending crash that was to come next but there was some slack in the cord or I might not be here today to write this. Somehow, my right foot got stuck in the triangle of the frame and my knee got twisted pretty good too.

I was most concerned with my knee at first since it immediately swelled up and was black and blue but that went away after a few days of constant ice and advil. My neck turned out to be the real issue. Long story short – after many x-rays, a trip to Bamako, more x-rays and a CAT-scan I was given a neck brace and diagnosed with a sprained neck. I can’t tell you how silly I looked in the neck brace let alone how silly I felt. I pretty much didn’t go out in public for a while.

Fast-forward a couple months to the present and I feel much better. There is no such thing as “physical therapy” in Mali, so I was left with figuring out my own exercises to rehabilitate myself. For a while, my entire spine was seriously tweaked but now just the top of my neck where it meets the back of my head is causing problems – where the whiplash gave me the most pain. The crazy thing is – this really isn’t that weird of an event – it is just another random thing that can happen in Africa. You just never know when a random telephone wire is going to be hanging across your path… I suppose I’ll watch out for them next time???