A motor tour of almost 1000 kilometers literally and figuratively ended with hard blows for Bart de Lepper (48) from Lieshout. On the way back, a kilometer from his house, he bumped into a van and a tree. Bart was not injured, the emergency services concluded. “A kind of miracle, we thought. But at home I collapsed.”
Bart went with thirteen friends a weekend motorcycling in Belgium, Germany and Luxembourg. A nice trip of more than 950 kilometers. “It all went fine. In Eindhoven we waved goodbye to each other. But yes, Nondeju: 1300 meters from my house it goes wrong.”
“Unimaginable”, Bart calls the collision. On the Sonseweg in Lieshout, he bumps into a delivery van with his motorcycle. The bus just turned onto the road from a driveway. “Suddenly the bus stood in front of me. I couldn’t go anywhere. I immediately knew I was going to clash.”
“Then we might have been talking about a cremation now.”
Bart shot towards a tree. “I was able to send left at the last minute. My motorcycle hit the tree. But I was launched from the engine and so I flew past the tree. That was my salvation. If I had popped against that tree, we might have been talking about a cremation now.”
Wich above Wonder did not seem to be injured. He was checked in an ambulance and brought home by the police. After the accident, an agent even reported to an 112 reporter from Omroep Brabant that Bart had an angel on his shoulder because he was not injured. But it was different.
A photo from the ambulance, when Bart still thought he was not wrong:
Once at home, Bart and his wife took off his motorcycle pants. “Then we saw my knee. It was as big as a basketball. I immediately lost my consciousness. Then we knew: this is not good at all. That ambulance was allowed to come back.”
Once in the hospital, Bart turned out to have a broken kneecap and a broken spine. His thigh muscle is partly torn and his pubic area is fur and blue. Bart has to recover for months and can barely move at the moment. He talks hard because he gets a lot of pain relief.
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He can hardly believe it all himself. “Knee disc in half, broken broken: I didn’t notice it after the accident. No one around me so actually, but I don’t blame the emergency services. I just seemed okay, but yes, you are completely tight with adrenaline at such a moment. That makes you feel nothing.” I have experienced that now. “
According to Bart, he has not had a ‘angel’, but ‘a whole peloton of angels’ on his shoulder. “I could have been dead. The agent who was in the accident called me back yesterday. He could not believe that I was not wrong, so he still wanted to check that. Well, that suspicion was right.”
Bart has a company in security cameras and alarm systems. The expectation is that he cannot work for months. In the meantime, he is flat in his hospital bed and has to provide an MRI scan about the damage to his body. “It’s just cunt,” he summarizes his misery with a small smile. “I hope it is not too bad.”