A road rash

Content warning: images of blood and raw wounds

Last year, I fell off my bike and received a giant gash on my knee. This description of my bloody knee is simply a way for me to satisfy my inner fascination with human ailments - it's not an allegory of any sort.

One sunny summer's afternoon, I went on an adventure around the edges of Melbourne. My plan was to ride my bike around the Capital City Trail, with a short detour to Ceres so I could visit the CERES bike shed and swap out my handlebar stem for a shorter one.

At Yarra Bend Park, the Capital City Trail becomes a steep downwards slope that culminates in a sharp, gravelly, left turn. Of course I fell over.

The immediate result was a road bike with a loose chain, and a somewhat rattled cyclist. A passer by gave me a hug and I sat down to eat my banana, collect my nerves and tend to my injuries. My knee was the most immediate pressing need. It's hard to ignore a stream of blood that has started soaking into your socks.

I was lucky to have no significant injuries elsewhere. My hands and hips were protected by my gloves and clothes.

Regardless of how I felt about my knee, I was less than halfway through the trail loop, more than 15 kilometers from home, and I still needed to fix my bike handlebar stem. I popped my bike chain back onto the proper place, poured some drinking water over my knee, and slogged onwards towards CERES.

The Bike Shed is a wonderful place (as is the rest of CERES Community Environment Park). The volunteer coordinator helped me with my bicycle modification.

Well, except for one guy dressed in full cycling gear, complete with very expensive bike, who took it upon himself to tell me that my bike was too big for me. He decided that I needed help pumping my bike wheels, and I had a good internal chuckle when he couldn't figure out how to inflate a simple presta valve. Dumping loads of money to look the part is no substitute for research and practice, and is definitely not a reason to be condescending!

Someone else told me that I had blood on my knee. Hmmm, you don't say.

I took the opportunity to use the bathroom to do more cleaning up of my knee.

Eventually I made it home and immediately hopped into the shower. The size of my road rash meant that the dressings I had didn't quite fit so I arranged some stretch gauze around my knee to keep the dressing in place.

Dinner at Moroccan Soup Bar was fantastic, as it always is. Unfortunately on the way home, I bled straight through the dressing and had to scrounge for some tissues to mop up the mess.

At Chemist's Warehouse, I found a packet of hydrocolloid dressings and decided to give them a go. They're really cool, but they are also really really disgusting when they get soft and squishy.

Underneath the dressing, it was pretty unpleasant looking. It also hurt! During this period, I was also hunting for a wedding dress, so I tried on white silk dresses with a weeping knee.

At work I told a colleague about my accident. He was very concerned, and told me that there had been lots of flooding at Yarra Bend Park recently, and that there were more and more cases of water borne flesh eating bacteria popping up in Victoria.

Eventually the exudate disappeared and the more surface level road rash healed up. It left behind two major gashes that worried me. I went to see the doctor about it. He said that if I had come to see him on the same day of the accident, he would have been able to stitch it back together, but because I waited too long, the edges of the wound had already started to become skin and I wouldn't be able to get stitches.

At the same time, I was wondering whether the dressings had been irritating my wound and causing the edges of the wound to swell up and separate from each other. Who knows - and I'm not willing to experiment to find out!

The whole thing did eventually scab over and heal up. I'm now left with a small scar. I took a photo of what it looks like now after one year has passed.

Not bad healing for a whole month's worth of pain!