As we prepared to leave, they strapped my bag onto my ATV with a bungee cord. I was having trouble with my helmet strap, so one of the guides helped me. Danela and her son JB were ready, so they took off ahead of me. I ended up following right behind Danela, and immediately noticed she didn’t have any brake lights—the entire brake assembly was missing from her bike. This made following even more difficult because I couldn’t tell when she was slowing down.

We went through a bit more town, then came out to a more country area where we picked up speed. I was staring straight at the back of Danela’s ATV, making sure I was staying close enough but also pacing properly when she stopped.

As we went up a big hill, I thought, “Man, we’re doing an ATV tour, and all I’m doing is staring at the one in front of me. I’m missing all this countryside.” So I took a quick look around—the ocean, an estate—beautiful. When I looked back, the guide had stopped the group at the top of the hill, and everyone was backing up.

Danela and I were probably 15-20 people back in the line. My guess is they were already starting to stop before I even looked away. Since I was following so closely, I didn’t have time to react. I saw they were stopped and thought, “Oh, shit.” I didn’t even have time to hit the brakes—all I could do was turn the wheel slightly to try to avoid a full collision.

I hit Danela’s ATV full force on the back left side. We were probably going about 20 miles an hour. What happened next is a bit of a blur. Danela felt the hit from the side and was thrown forward, almost off her ATV, but she managed to stay on. For me, I felt the crunch of the impact, flew forward, and tumbled. My helmet hit something and cracked. My sunglasses shattered on my face. I rolled several times and ended up on the side of the road.

My first instinct was to get up, but I quickly realized that wasn’t happening. I sat up and had a head rush, and reailzed I needed to lay back down. I thought, “I’ll catch my breath for a minute, then get up.” That’s when I saw Dannella came toward me. I heard he say “Oh boy… Okay, don’t worry about this. I got you.” I didn’t understand why she was making such a big deal about it. She pinned my shoulders to the ground, put her face right over mine, and said, “You’re just fine. You’re going to be just fine. You need to lie still.”

That’s when it hit me: I’d actually hurt myself—badly.

Danela and Joanne each grabbed one of my hands. “Don’t move your left leg,” they said. “Just don’t move it.”

“But it’s really uncomfortable,” I protested.

“Don’t move it,” they insisted.

I asked Danela to support my leg since I couldn’t hold it up. She put her arm under my thigh to keep it stable. I asked if I could put my right leg down, and they said yes. But as I moved my foot, something felt very wrong. “My foot feels weird,” I thought. “It feels like my foot isn’t attached right,” I said to Dannella and JoAnn. They looked at each other and didn’t respond to me other than to say it would be okay.