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On February 3, 2006, two weeks after Laura and I got married at City Hall, she got into a terrible bike accident. She doesn’t remember what happened and there were no witnesses. They found her lying two blocks away from the restaurant she worked at. She had flown forward straight onto her face without putting her hands out to break her fall. We have no idea what caused it.
This was the most harrowing sight of my life. Not only because of how she looked, but because she was delirious and vomiting blood. The doctors were talking about potential brain damage or a broken C1 vertebra (the same bone Christopher Reeve broke). It was terrifying. Luckily, it ended up just being a broken nose and cheekbone and lots of bruising. Also, her front tooth was knocked out, which is actually what saved her from more serious injury to her neck or brain because it took all the weight of the fall. It was a miracle tooth.
Laura bounced back surprisingly fast after such a traumatizing accident. I think she recovered better than I did. I still suffer from the worst anxiety when we ride our bikes together. This photo was taken seven months later outside Austin, Texas. That date-stamp is wrong. I was shooting with a little camera I bought at a flea market, and the date was stuck in 1998. In 1998 Laura would have been 12, which would make me a considerable pervert.