The afternoon before yesterday, I set out on my little electric bike in a great mood, planning to go shopping. I ended up crashing into a small sedan at the entrance to a commercial center.
I still remember that moment very clearly. I was riding straight along the non-motor vehicle lane when, a little over a meter ahead of me, a car suddenly appeared and stopped right in front of me while turning. I braked as hard as I could, but there was no way to fully cancel out the momentum. I slammed into the car door and fell.
At first I didn’t feel much pain. After I got up, though, I saw a large scrape on my hand, already bruised and swelling, and there was also a big bruise on my left knee. Thankfully, they seemed like the kind of injuries I could tolerate. The driver was an older woman with a child in the car. She looked like this was probably her first time dealing with something like this, and honestly, neither of us really knew what to do.
A few local women who were waiting for the bus nearby came over and helped me up and checked my injuries. At that point, I was thinking I could just talk it over with the driver and have her take me to the nearby People’s Hospital so they could clean and treat the wound. But she hesitated and called the police anyway, so I figured I might as well wait for traffic police to arrive.
The problem was that they were already handling another accident, so we had to wait. During that time, the driver’s younger brother also came to the scene to see what had happened and discuss how it should be handled. He seemed worried there might be bone injuries in my hand or knee. From my perspective, the likely outcome was pretty obvious: if traffic police came and determined responsibility, the sedan would probably be fully at fault. I was wearing a helmet, I wasn’t going fast, and I hadn’t broken any traffic rules.
What touched me most was one of the women at the bus stop who kept speaking up for me. She said that my suggestion to let the driver take me to get treated first showed goodwill on my part. I hadn’t even been the one insisting on calling the police, and I had also told the driver that the traffic police would probably assign responsibility to her. After thinking it over, she decided not to wait at the scene any longer and drove me to the hospital first.
Luckily, the hospital was less than two kilometers from where the accident happened, so we got there quickly. But because the police had already been called, I couldn’t register as a normal orthopedics patient. I had to go through emergency instead. I registered for orthopedics there and got CT scans of the bruised areas on my hand and knee. After looking at the scans, the doctor said there was nothing wrong at all. You could feel the driver relax instantly after hearing that, and she was finally able to talk to me more normally.
The traffic police later came to the emergency department and asked us for the basic details of what happened. They said that if we couldn’t settle it privately, we could go to the traffic police office later for formal responsibility determination and negotiation. I mentioned that I had to work on Monday. The driver, meanwhile, had clearly been worried that if I turned out to have other injuries, the medical bills might become a big expense, so at first she had been leaning toward going through the full official process. In the end, though, the exam results showed no serious problem. The doctor only told me to apply ice packs. I wasn’t even prescribed any medicine.
By then it was almost dark. We talked over the hospital examination costs and the later repair costs for my little e-bike, and after that I still went shopping on my own bike. A Chinese woman’s mission in life is apparently to go shopping no matter what.
At the time, the injuries on my hand and knee didn’t hurt too much. Even that night, before going to sleep, I still felt mostly fine. But in the middle of the night, I suddenly woke up from a nightmare about the crash. On top of that, I started feeling a faint pain in my right knee—the one that hadn’t even looked bruised. I couldn’t fall back asleep.
The next morning, things got stranger. My entire right hand was sore, and I couldn’t fully straighten my forearm. I remember thinking: can the aftereffects really hit this hard later on? But there wasn’t much I could do because I had an exam to take first. By today, the arm feels a little better. I looked it up online, and people said it might just be a muscle strain in the arm, which sounds plausible.
I do regret one thing now: when I had the CT scans done, I didn’t ask them to also check the part near my right knee that didn’t show any bruising. I genuinely don’t know why that area started hurting too, or why my arm became so sore afterward. Still, I think it should probably be okay. The doctor had written me a note recommending three days of rest, but I never ended up needing to use it. Sometimes bad luck just comes out of nowhere.
On the ride back from shopping that night, I realized I was already a little traumatized about riding. I kept thinking, what if another car suddenly shoots out in front of me? Then, after passing through a signalized intersection, I spotted nearly ten traffic police officers hiding in the shadows ahead. A couple riding beside me without helmets were stopped immediately. Traffic police really are checking seriously these days. At that moment I felt incredibly lucky that I had my helmet on properly—otherwise I might have ended up being questioned by traffic police twice in one day.
After I got home, I kept thinking about how traffic accidents really are everywhere now. Before, they were always stories I heard about happening to other people. When it suddenly happens to you, it feels completely unexpected.
No matter what, the lesson is still simple: follow the traffic rules, and value your life.