AUBURN — Out for a ride on Hotel Road on Monday, Jude Cyr’s bike tire caught on railroad tracks and sent him sprawling.
Bloody and shaken, he told someone his name before passing out.
Jenny Cyr wonders what would have happened if he hadn’t.
Her father, business manager for the Auburn School Department, out cycling alone at lunchtime, didn’t have any ID.
“I believe the response team would have gotten the help he needed, but how long before we would have been (contacted)?” she said. She wondered how long he would have sat in the hospital alone. “That’s not a comfortable feeling.”
She is determined to get the word out to friends and family, cyclists and runners: Carry something with your name.
Also a cyclist, she ordered a plastic ID bracelet with her birth date and emergency contacts on Wednesday. By chance, days before her father’s accident, she had skimmed a brochure for the same.
“I put it back, thinking, ‘It’s not like I’ll need it this week,'” said Cyr, a teacher who lives in Auburn. “You never know.”
Noel Smith, president of the Maine Cycling Club, said they require helmets — something Cyr credits as saving her father from worse injuries — and this year began adding contact information to membership cards as a form of emergency ID. Smith included his medications and the hospital he’d want to go to on his card and he wears it around his neck.
“When you’re out riding on the road, you’re always fighting the percentages because there’s so many things that can go wrong out there,” he said. There are railroad tracks. Sand. Cars. Dogs. Other cyclists. “Eventually, the numbers catch up with you and something’s going to happen, whether you like it or not.”
Deputy Chief Jason Moen of the Auburn Police Department, which helped track down Cyr’s family, said carrying an ID is important, as is having a contact in your cell phone or iPad under ICE, In Case of Emergency.
After spending one night at Central Maine Medical Center, Cyr said her father will be re-evaluated by doctors next week.
“He has head trauma,” she said. “He had a concussion from the bike fall, facial and upper body abrasions. He knows how to handle (railroad tracks), but accidents happen. He just caught the front wheel somehow on the railroad track and ended up — I don’t know how — 25 feet away.”
kskelton@sunjournal.com
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- One of the new items on the market is a wrist band to wear when exercising to help identify you if something happens and you become unconscious. One of the more popular companies producing a variety of products can be found at www.roadid.com.
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