” Hello my love, I am just about to close the store, I will be at home by 645pm the latest”. “OK love, see you later then, be safe…..” These words, made during the last call to my wife at 6pm, are the last memories I have of the awful evening of 25 October 2016, and could have been easily my final words…….so here’s my story. 25.10.16……18:00 hrs, I close the Giant Durbanville Concept store I have been working as Store Manager for a while and I jump onto my TCR ADV Pro 0. I decided only the week before to start to commute to work, as I needed to regain my fitness after a two-month break due to two consecutive surgeries on my right shoulder in July to repair a dislocated A-C joint. Last Oct, 2015, I was victim of a silly incident while training with my cycling buddies while riding back from Chappies at the Waterfront. My front wheel skidded on the wet tarmac where a few drops of rain had fallen and I fell heavily on my right shoulder, snapping my AC Joint to the 3rd degree, as well as chipping my right pelvis from an almost standing position….one of those things…… The first surgery was not successful as the stiches on my joint came loose after few months so it was decided to have a follow up surgery in July 2016, followed a week later by a third attempt to stop the same ligament from pulling loose, and a new type of ligament was applied to fix my AC Joint. So now after two months with a sling around my neck I am excited that I can return to my training routine, this year I have set many goals for myself and I have already purchased entries to several races just like I did in 2015 and 2014: first of all was my second Attakwas, then the 99er followed by the PPA, Tour of Good Hope and finally the Cape Argus. I am convinced I will achieve my ultimate goal of riding that 110 Km race in less than 2:55 hrs, I know I have it in my legs, just want to do it and get over it with the psychological pressure I have put on myself over the past few years, it is going to be a fantastic year 2017 for my racing, I know it, I feel it…… I put on my small back pack on my back, switch my three lights on, one blinking white on my front handlebar and two on my rear end including one on my back pack so to make sure I can be very visible to drivers. It’s a splendid Cape Town evening; with plenty of sun and crystal clear vision and off I go. It takes me usually 35/40 minutes to ride from Durbanville to my home in Sunningdale in the traffic; it is a nice ride with a few hills and a fast downhill section at Tikidraai before arriving at the traffic lights where I will take a right turn then a left one before entering the bridge that leads to Sanddown Road. That bridge always gives me the shivers as it is always busy and I am very, very careful on how to approach it. Sadly there is nowhere else for me to go as the cycle path that you follow if you come from Durbanville ends right there and it starts again at the end of the same, so cyclists are forced to use the main road on that bridge if they have to go in that direction. I get there and then………PITCH BLACK! No more memories, nothing. It feels like my life ends at that point and then, thankfully, starts again one week later! OUCH!! OUCH!! THAT LIGHT…..SO BRIGHT….can somebody switch that light off for me please???? ……………………Where am I? ………….WHO AM I? SO much pain……my chest, my God, it’s so painful……my shoulder…….what is this tube sticking out on the right side of my chest???? I cant breath…….I can’t breath……WHO ARE ALL OF THESE PEOPLE AROUND ME??????AND WHY I HAVE MY HANDS BEEN TIED WITH RESTRAINTS TO THE RAILS OF THE BED???? I passed out again….the voices inside my head stop screaming at once….. Sometime later I wake up again and this time I see my wife on the side of the bed, then I see the wife of a my very good friend Richard, who owns the Giant Concept Store in Durbanville, who is crying next to me…….I do not understand what is happening….. “ Nadine, why is that woman crying??” Who are all these people?? Why am I here? I am in so much pain……love please help me!” I asked for a piece of paper and a pen; I write: WHAT IS THIS TUBE? WHO AM I? WHOM I REALLY AM? WHAT YEAR? I need to step back a little now, and go back to 6:30pm of the 25th of October 2016. I have no recollection of what happened to me but I rely the information I have from the first two people who I owe my life to; two ladies that were driving right behind me that late afternoon and saw the entire incident. It is green light and I am riding back home with the right of way passing the traffic lights when one car suddenly does not respect the stop and takes a right turn to, probably, ride to Dunoon. There is no time for me to either break or to turn away from the danger, the car hits me on its left side, I smash against the left side of the windshield, my front fork snaps instantly above my front wheel. My right shoulder, the one that had three surgeries in the past few months, takes the worst hit, along with my chest, before my body flies over the roof of the car, my helmet protects my head by leaving a streak of its red color on the white roof of the car, then I crash on the pavement on my left side where I remain in shock with a major concussion. The situation is serious so these two ladies stop immediately; one grabbed hold of my head and kept me immobilized to protect my neck, while the other one re-directs the traffic. I cry for help and I am in complete agony. I have sustained multiple fractures with loss of bones in my just recovered right shoulder, seven ribs broken with a flail segment, a double fracture in my left pelvis, right lung collapsed and bleeding into the lung, major concussion shock, a large exposed cut in my right knee and I am covered in blood and bruises all over my body. Thankfully and miraculously my neck and my spine did not sustain any major hit, as otherwise my situation could have been so much worse with paralysis or brain damage a certain result. One of the two ladies tried to get hold of an ambulance as well as the Police with no success. After several attempts, she decides to call her husband for help, and now my story gets even more bizarre to say the least. How our lives are inter-twined is really spooky. My wife is not at home that evening, but she is in the city centre doing a photography class. She does it every week, as photography is her passion. During the lesson, while the students were practicing portrait shots on their cameras the person sat next to my wife Nadine, whom she does not know as it is only the second week of the class, receives a phone call and speaks loudly about “request for an ambulance, a cyclist injured, and N7 Potsdam Road.” These words immediately alerted my wife’s sixth sense and she asks the person what was going on. She received a quick response that some cyclist was badly hit by a car and he needed to get hold of an ambulance to assist at the scene. Nadine immediately knew that it was me. She decided to walk out of the classroom and sends me few messages to reassure herself I was ok. Those messages were never responded to. After a few minutes she decided to go back into the classroom and try to calm herself down thinking that this horrible news had nothing to do with her and she was being irrational. A few minutes later her phone rings, she rushes outside thinking of me returning her call back only to hear the voice of a stranger which asks: “Is this Nadine Cafiso?” Her blood freezes, yet at the same time her professionalism, my wife is a Medical Doctor, immediately takes over. She replies “yes”. He states “I have Daniele here”. She asks “is he alive?”, and he replies “yes”, she asks “is he the cyclist run over on the N7?”, he replies “ Yes”, and eventually her and the Paramedic on the other side of the line started to have a conversation over my critical conditions and the best possible course of action to take. The paramedic that responded to the call was the same one that the guy sat at the photo class who was sitting next to my wife, called up and his wife was the one holding my head at the scene………. My cell phone was in my backpack. The Paramedic managed to find the last phone call made from my phone, which was made to my wife at store closing time, still in the calls log memory and that’s how they managed to call her up……. My wife runs back to the class to grab her belongings and says calmly to the guy still sat next to her with her hand on his arm “Thank you for saving my husband’s life, he is the cyclist on the N7,” and off the she rushes to the Hospital to meet up with the Paramedics. I was eventually taken to Milnerton Medi Clinic after a very long 40 minutes laying on the tarmac because of the delay in response from ambulance. It is peculiar to know the fact that in the 5 Km radius there are 3 Hospitals in that particular area...... I remained for 12 days in ICU and two days in the ward. I was given four bags of blood for transfusion, I was intubated for 24 hours and restrained to the rails of the bed because the pain was so much that I reacted very badly to all attempt by the medical staff to help me with my injuries and was trying to pull the tube out of my throat. I had a drain in my right side of the chest because of the collapsed lung, drips by my neck to constantly give me painkillers because of the pain I was going through, an epidural in my spine to infuse a constant amount of pain relief to try to help me to breathe properly. Eventually I was given so much morphine and similar opioids that I started to have daily nightmares and hallucinations, seeing dragons and devils everywhere I looked. After the adrenaline started to wear off, I could not move a single muscle, could not breathe nor cough because of the seven broken ribs, had to remain in one position only because of my destroyed shoulder on one side and the vertigo and extreme nausea I immediately suffered if I turned on the other side, as result of the concussion. I could not stand because of my balloon-swollen knees and the double fracture of my left pelvis. Apparently it was later discovered that it was just matters of centimeters that saved me from being called an “Open Book fracture” and could then potentially have bled to death on the scene. I could not take care of my “business” and relied entirely on the mercy and care of the ICU nurses on call for anything I needed, living some of the most humiliating moments of my life. The moment of the much-needed reconstruction of my right shoulder eventually arrived and was taken to theatre after few days in ICU. Because of my lungs poor condition I was put to sleep very quickly and woken up from the anesthetic very quickly too, leaving me very confused and aggressive towards my wife and to the nurse in ICU shouting at the top of my lungs “Why cant I get a drink in this bar, this is pathetic??” I was convinced I was in a Night Club with Dragon and Devils all around me and wanted to quench my thirst I guess….. The fourth surgery on the shoulder was eventually successfully completed and the skills of the Surgeon, including the use of a metal plate and 9 screws, helped to regain the resemblance of a human shoulder again… The Police never reported to the scene regardless of the attempt to contact them. We eventually learned know who the driver was because thankfully, he never fled the scene and a woman that was in the car with him wrote his details on a piece of paper and then put it inside the backpack I was wearing while I was laying on the tarmac. This piece of paper was later found by my wife once she returned home and inspected my personal belongings she brought home from the incident scene at 3am once she felt that I was stable enough to get a couple of hours rest……. My wife went to the Police station of Bothasig to report my incident and she was attended to by a Policewoman who almost immediately told her off and said“ How dare you report an incident if you were not present? Only your husband can make a report of the incident!” to which my crying and overly stressed wife responded “ My husband is almost dying now in a ICU ward on a ventilator at Milnerton Clinic and when we tried to reach out to you nobody responded to our call. If I do not report the accident to you how will you ever find out about it?” Eventually, the Police Station’s Captain came out of his office and managed to calm my wife down and got all information available at the time, including plenty of pictures taken by the two ladies that were at the scene at the time with their phones. An interview with a member of the Police station was later arranged to meet with me and eventually three weeks later, after my extremely fortunate return home, a Sergeant came to my home and interviewed me. He mentioned that he had already listened and put on record the eyewitness statements that were at the scene as well as the driver (who should be commended he claimed, as the driver actually made it to the Police station as opposed to simply disappear into the unknown… and being an all to common “hit and run” as we so often seen in South Africa). The eyewitness had sworn that I was following all street-riding rules and it was only the wrongdoing of the Renault Clio’s driver that caused my incident. At the end of my interview, the Policeman, who had listened carefully and wrote everything on a writing pad whatever I could remember, bluntly asked me without showing any sentiment: “What would you like me to do with all of this report now?” To my astonishment I replied: “How about some justice? How would you like it if what happened to me would have happened to somebody you loved or someone in your family and nothing gets done about it?” The Policeman simply ended the interview by saying “Will pass this onto a Judge now”. I never heard from the Police again. I also never heard from the driver either, not a word to find out if I was alive or not, nor an apology. I am told that eventually Traffic Police fined him R1000 because he did not have a Driver‘s License, and to date no criminal charges, to my knowledge, have been given to him….. Eventually I hired a lawyer, who will follow up my case, although I was given, during the interview time with him, almost no hopes for proper justice to be carried out. During my days immobilized in the ICU ward I had a lot of deadly thoughts about that man. I was promising myself to make a mission in life to track him down and do my own justice. I swore I wanted him dead for what he had done to me and vowed to get revenge. One day while in the ICU I was sharing these thoughts with my wife and, after I finish talking, my wife said: “Daniele, you have two choices now; the first one is to hate that man, thinking about how to get justice for his wrong doings and think about it everyday. Eventually this will consume you like a worm slowly eating you away from the inside out, until there is nothing left, full of hate, anger and resentment, which will swallow you from the inside out. And you will have wasted all of your energy on him. Or you can forget about him, think about tomorrow with positivity in your heart, and use your energy to heal. Your broken bones will heal, the scrapes and scratches will disappear, we have still each other and you are alive, and I know one day you will be riding your bike again and get stronger, if not even stronger than before.” I will never forget my darling wife’s words in that precise moment and suddenly my entire attitude changed and I can truthfully say that my miraculous healing process started right in that moment. In the following days I started to receive hundreds and hundreds of messages from family and friends all over the world as well as complete strangers. Everyone wanted me to get better soon and sent positive thoughts and good karma to my wife and I. Somebody I had never met in my life even opened a topic in an online Cycling Forum which registered more than 4500 hits and six pages of encouragements and prayers from members of the Forum I had never met. They even looked for and found pictures of me on the Internet and posted them for people to see who I was. Friends dedicated their race medals earned at the Wine to Wales MTB race to me. It was an overwhelming experience and many times I cried my heart out for the emotions. It is now three months today, January 25th, 2017, from my life threatening incident, and I am fortunate and happy to say that I am alright. My injuries have just like in a miracle, almost completely disappeared. My ribs are still a bit sore but healed albeit a bit skew, the pelvis is healed, my shoulder is getting better day after day although it will be permanently deformed, the lungs are functioning again 100% and my concussion is just a bad memory of the past. Doctors said to me countless times that my fitness helped to achieve my incredibly fast recovery, and this is a credit to never stop exercising, regardless of your age. Cycling is a fantastic sport and I will continue training. My Road bike days are over in Cape Town because of the increased danger out on the roads; it is so heartbreaking reading almost everyday of fatal incidents with cyclist involved and very often taxis, and I promised my wife not to give her anymore heartbreaks, but my faithful MTB will continue to be my passion and my serotonin provider for many more years to come. Cape Epic wait up as I am coming for you one day…….. I am back at work at Giant Durbanville Concept Store now, I manage the Store to the best of my ability and it is rewarding to see how many people have been touched by my accident, as there is not a single day where customers I do not even know, welcome me back at work, ask about my health and want to talk about my story. There are so many people who carried me through this ordeal, and were amazing everyday in their care and kindness. First of all my wife, my rock, my friend, my life partner, my everything, my beloved Nadine, without her I would be nothing. Thank you to the good Samaritans and passers-by that stopped to help me. Zahn, Rhiannon, Irene you are three that I know of, and if there are others I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the selfless act of stopping and helping a stranger, calling the ambulance, keeping me safe and protecting me until the paramedics arrived and being Good Samaritans. Thank you to the paramedics of ER24, and Willem Jordaan especially for picking me up in the moment of most fear and pain on the Potsdam road straight after the incident happened, where we are still not quite sure what exactly happened and phoning my wife to tell her that they had me in their care. Thank you to the ER staff at Milnerton Medi-clinic, especially Dr Jessica Paul and Johan the Sister on duty who took such wonderful care of me, as well as the Radiographer and radiologists who carried out the scans and X-rays no matter what hour of the night it was. Thank you to Dr Wilandi Jacobs the surgeon who came in late at night after hours to put in the chest drain and CVP and make sure that I was stable. Thank you to the ICU staff who truly are angels among us. Patrick, Jilajay, Taj, Amanda, Charlotte, Khaya, Caira, and sister Daleen, you were all so supportive to me looking after me as well as my wife while giving me the highest level of care and kindness, making sure to pull me through my multiple injuries, times of fear and confusion and severe pain. To the anesthetists Dr Zondagh and Dr Spies who helped control my pain and give me the anesthetic for the shoulder procedures that Dr Christelle van der Watt carried out so effortlessly. To Dr Tania Kotze who managed me as the Captain of a ship with my multiple injuries, and Dr Rod who stood in over the weekend, who were there everyday, keeping a close eye on my progress. To Dr Haug for making sure my brain was still, somewhat, functioning normally after the massive impact my head had taken and the severe concussion I suffered afterwards. To Dr Peter Smith for looking after my knees and hips. To the physiotherapists Nick and his team who coaxed me into using my lungs again despite the broken ribs and pain I was enduring. And to all the colleagues and new friends that my wife has made through this experience, who looked after her and made sure that she was holding up everyday, you all know who you are. Made sure she was eating, took her for coffee, came to check on her, sent her messages and phoned. The group of cyclists who are my “South African family” who took my wife under their wing and sent her whatsapp’s encouragement messages everyday; Stephen, Charl, Maria and Marcel, Claudio Mazingone, Sean, Steve, Warren, Lindsay, Wayne, Rudy, Richard and Karyn, Salvie, Paul, Jacques, Dr Karin van Niekerk and my Mum and Dad-in-law, and the many others who made sure she was managing, and came to sit with her at my bedside waiting for me to heal. And to all the friends and family, far abroad and here at home, who sent messages of encouragement and prayed for us everyday, made us feel safe, and sent angels, including my late Daddy from the heavens, to look over us to carry us to the day that I was finally declared out of danger. My wife started a whatsapp group called “Daniele’s recovery” to update friends and family of my progress and had constant support all day from everyone all over the world. I was not sure that today would arrive, or when it would arrive, and although I am emotionally and psychologically exhausted as I write this story, I am so thankful and grateful to be able to spend another day with my wife, to have another dinner, another cup of coffee and to be able to wake up together one more time. You may say, that’s not so bad, but if you see the state of the car, the state of the bike and hear about the injuries, it could have been so, so much worse………. And although a long road of healing and recovery still lies ahead, just like my darling wife said to me once: the broken bones will heal, the scrapes and scratches will disappear, and I will ride my bicycle again and will be just as strong one day in the not too distant future. BTW, the sub-3 at the Argus is still an open business to deal with….. Don’t ever take a day for-granted, and cherish everyday you have with your loved ones, as we never know how long our time on earth will be, and how much time we have left. Everyday is a gift, cherish it. Daniele Cafiso
