When you crash on a motorcycle there are a lot things that can happen, all of them are bad. Unlike when riding in a car you aren’t protected by safety belts and a roll cage, instead you are ejected from the vehicle. Here is a list of some of the things you can expect if you crash on a motorcycle, especially if you don’t wear protective gear.

1. Road Rash:

This is the term used to describe the large swathes of missing skin that occur when you go tumbling over the pavement with no protective gear. For a better visual it is similar to starting up a belt sander and pressing it over your flesh until it is nice, pink and bleeding, then pouring gravel and small rocks all over the wound.

Imagine doing this to your entire forearm, finger tips, butt, thighs, knees, and ankles. If you don’t wear a full face helmet add grinding off your nose, cheeks or lips to the previous list. In most cases people will rationalize not wearing gear by saying it’s too hot to wear leathers, or maybe even ‘scars are sexy’. I don’t know anyone who thinks looking like a burn victim is sexy.

If you are lucky enough to survive the crash, you may need skin grafts to replace the skin you have lost to the asphalt. This requires taking portions of healthy skin from other parts of your body, cutting them off, and ‘medically stapling’ them to the road rashed portions of you. Once they do that then you will get to experience the wound vacuum. Here is a detailed account of the motorcyclist who had to have their skin grafts vacuumed:

“Wound vac: a slang medical term that will give me goose bumps for the rest of my life. When a patient receives a skin graft, a suction cup is placed over the completed surgery in order to increase blood flow from under the new skin. These devices are called wound vacuums, and they ensure that the burn tissue does not die, but rather joins with the new skin to create a layer of dermis where none would have grown without the graft surgery. It feels like a leech, a constant sucking on the most painful abrasion you’ve had in your entire life. Multiply your worst skinned knee as a kid by 50, add it to 55 percent of your body, and then let someone suck on it with a handheld vacuum for 24 hours a day; only then will you know what it is to experience a wound vacuum on a fresh skin graft. Each graft received a dose of the painful sucking and after three weeks I was free from the noisy machines.”

If you want to read Brittany’s story of her recovery, check the link.

2. Broken Bones:

When you buy decent quality protective gear they will often come with soft or hard armor at the joints. This is to protect against the impact of hitting the pavement at speed. If you crash without protective gear than you are much more likely to suffer broken kneecaps, ankles, collar bones and ribs. If you are very unlucky then you might even get to see your bone poking out of your skin by suffering a compound fracture.

3. Thrashed Bike:

Even if you manage to come away unscathed for the most part, chances are your bike will be having a worse day than you. Repairs to a downed bike can easily go into the hundreds, and sometimes thousands of dollars depending on the make and model. I have a 2001 Kawasaki ZX6R and to replace one piece of the fairings on my bike would cost me over $300, and that’s just ONE piece. Generally a motorcycles fairing consists of 2-8 separate pieces!

Once you get your bike to a mechanic (or back to your house if you are your own mechanic) you are going to have to look over the majority of the bike to make sure everything that was damaged is repaired. Forks, clutch levers, brake levers, pegs, crankcase covers, headlights and fairings are just some of the things you can expect to replace or repair in a low speed crash.

If your frame is damaged you might as well total the bike rather than risk it twisting or snapping when you are taking a corner at high speed. I always recommend buying a motorcycle outright, that way you get a better deal. If you did get a loan to buy the bike I hope you have full coverage because if you crash you will be paying for a bike you can’t ride for months and months.

4. Death:

Death is the ultimate price to pay for anything, and while riding a motorcycle you are much more likely to visit the reaper than if you are driving a car. When you are riding in a car you are surrounded by thousands of pounds of steel, aluminum, and plastic to protect you from the outside world. If that wasn’t enough you also have safety harnesses to keep you in the car, and air bags that inflate in milliseconds to provide a safety cushion against the steering wheel and car doors.

Just to put icing on the cake the car will sacrifice itself since most are designed to crumple in specific spots to absorb the impact of a crash instead of transferring that inertia to you. Motorcycles in comparison are more dangerous than running with a hypodermic needle filled with the Ebola virus. You are almost always thrown off the motorcycle when you crash unless you somehow become entangled in the machine and are unable to escape.

When you are flying through the air you have to pray that you hit the ground and are able to slide to a stop before you become crushed or impaled on stop signs, road barriers or other vehicles. If you land in the roadway you have to decide between staying on the ground and potentially being run over by cars that can’t see you, or moving and possibly making any injury your have (including spinal injuries!) even worse. Anyway you slice it crashing is not a picnic.

5. Dismemberment:

A guard rail is designed to help keep cars on the road, but if a motorcycle crashes into one then it can turn into an axe with the ability to lop off legs, hands, arms, even tear people in two.

6. Bruising / Internal bleeding

Most vehicle accidents will result in bruising of some type, from the mild black eye to internal bleeding so severe that you need surgery to survive. As a rule is you are bleeding from any place you normally shouldn’t (ears, eyes, bloody stool/urine) then you might be hurt far worse than you think you are. It is always a good idea to get checked out by a medic or doctor before going home to heal. Here’s a video of a guy getting 1200cc’s of fluid drained from his lungs after crashing his motorcycle. Fun!

7. Dislocated Eyeball:

A little known injury to motorcycle and car crash victims is eyes being forced out of their sockets from the impact of a crash. That makes me shudder even thinking about it. How would you react if you were fully conscious and your popped out and started to rattle around inside your helmet. You would be completely disoriented by getting two images in your brain from two different angles, one is your normal eye, the other from your eye hanging down in your helmet. Ugh. Although I couldn’t find a video of an eye popped out, this rider did break his orbital bones and injured his left eye quite a bit.