No, that's not what happened at all. I described it in detail a number of years ago, I was signaling a left turn from a bike lane, looking back. From what I've been able to put together, a car from a parking lot on my right decided to swerve in front of me, and I ended up returning to consciousness about 40 minutes later.

By the evidence of my injuries, I tried to brake with my left hand (right hand remained on the top bar), spraining my thumb in the process (probably as the bike went over). I landed on my head, with the bike up in the air, next hit on my right shoulder, then my right hip (severe contusion with the skin being severed underneith from the underlying tissue--it took two years to regain feeling on that part of my hip and I needed a number of trips to the hospital to remove fluid from the underlying area). The bike came down last, and other than a scraped front fender and torn handlebar tape on the right side (I had bar-end shifters, which were not damaged), the bike was okay.

My speculation is that my front tire touched the vehicle's rear tire, it rotating down and the vehicle's tire rotating up, in such a manner that it threw the bike into the air, and I came down on my head, shattering my helmet in the process (a dozen pieces), and bouncing my head so that I got a secondary cut on my head from the second hit (three staples--which induced dizziness when I touched the center one--go figure!).

Had I been using a mirror, I could have monitored both in front of me and behind for oncoming traffic. I did not swerve in front of another car, and so far as I know, never initiated the turn out of the bike lane that I was trying to move away from for a left turn at the bottam of the hill (two hundred yards or so away when I began my turn sequence. With the mirror, I would simply have slowed down, yielded to the car, and gone to the bottom of the hill in the bike lane. From there I would have used the signal to cross as an alternative.

When I asked John Forester about the mirror, he said my mistake was not getting into the far left lane way up the road. But to do that, I would be riding for about half a mile in the far left lane. That is why I stated above that, using VC techniques of clearing myself by looking back (not using a mirror) for an extended time (I was still in the bike lane, and could stay there if I wanted--I can go in a straight line, you know), I set myself up for being hit by a car coming from my right (blind-sided, as they say).

By the way, my trauma doc said, on a subsequent visit to remove fluid from my hip, that "If you had not been wearing a helmet, and had been unlucky that day, you would have lived."

John