Years ago, while pedaling along a long flat stretch in central New Jersey, I saw a woman and her bicycle lying on the side of the road. She was conscious but in obvious pain. I promised her I'd call for help at the next public phone. (This was in the days before cell phones.) She waved her hand. "No. I don't need..."
"Are you sure?"
She nodded.
Of course, I was going to call for help, but not long after I started pedaling away, I heard a siren and glanced back to see flashing lights.
I wondered whether she was OK--and why she didn't want help. Was there someone she didn't want to worry? Or, perhaps, she worried about a potential bill: Maybe she didn't have insurance. It didn't occur to me that she didn't want to be found out by immigration officers or other authorities because such things weren't much in the public discourse and she was a white woman who seemed to speak English without a discernible accent.
She may simply have been stubborn--as I can be in such situations. Or she may have had another fear that I hadn't thought about last night, when I came across the story I am about to relate.
The 27th of January in 2018 dawned as a cool and windy but clear morning--one that practically begs for a ride--in North Texas. And so Tan Flippin did.
The 57-year-old Baptist pastor, who'd taken up cycling after a torn meniscus ended his running regimen, was pedaling on a street by a subdivision. He'd ridden that particular street many times before "with no issues," he recalled. That street, however, had recently undergone repairs. "I guess they had a little bit of asphalt left over and put it on the shoulder," he explained.
His front tire ran into that asphalt. His shoes came unclipped from his pedals as he flipped over the handlebars. "I'd had a lot of wrecks and just got up and brushed myself off," he said. But this time "there was a terrible pain in my right hip and I couldn't stand."
His wife, Janet, drove him to the hospital. Four fractures were found in his hip. Due to the nature of his accident, doctors wanted to do a CAT scan. He waved them off but those doctors--and Janet--prevailed.
The images revealed a mass pressing against the front of his skull, pressing against his brain. The doctors thought it was brain bleed, considering the kind of accident Flippin experienced. (I had a mild brain bleed near the back of my head after my crash in New Rochelle two years ago.) Looking at those images again brought more somber news: what doctors thought was brain bleed was, in fact, a baseball-sized tumor. A few days later, they realized the tumor was malignant.
A grueling surgery and rounds of chemotherapy defined his two years--until cancerous tumors developed on his breast bone and ribs--and another on his skull. That is how Flippin learned he has a rare blood disorder that predisposes him to tumors growing on his bones. Radiation was no longer an option, so in October of 2021, he underwent bone marrow and stem cell transplants.
He's been cancer-free ever since. Six months later, he was on his bike again.
Being the pastor he is, he believes that God used the accident to save his life. Well, I won't comment on that, but it's not hard to wonder what would have happened to him had he not given in to his wife and the doctors and not gone to the hospital--or gotten the CAT scans.
And now I'm wondering what happened to that woman I saw, with her bike, on the side of a New Jersey road so many years ago.
