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My husband called around 4:45 pm from his bike ride. There was noise in the background and I couldn’t hear him clearly. Something about being hit by a car. I thought he was telling me that someone he was riding with got hit and he was going with him to the hospital. “Who got hit?” I asked. “I got hit!” he said.

All I could think was, thank God he’s the one calling me—it couldn’t have been too bad of an accident if he can call me himself. I heard a siren in the background. “Is that for you?” I asked. He said it was, but assured me he was all right. I planned to pile the kids in the car and come right away, but he told me to wait. We thought that the paramedics would just send him on his way since he felt fine, and that he’d be back home by the time I could get there.

Ten minutes later he called again. “They want me to go to the hospital just in case.” “I’ll meet you there” I said. (Contrary to the little gray box in the middle of my husband’s article, I did NOT just complain that he was going to come home late!) Our very kind neighbors came over to watch the kids. I tried to smile big and be very nonchalant with the girls. “Daddy bumped into a car, and the doctor just wants to check him so I’m going to go keep him company. How about macaroni and cheese for dinner?” They handled my sudden absence pretty well and I bolted into the car.

I’ve often told my husband that if he were ever to get hurt doing something stupid I would not come to the hospital. This was something that I felt needed to be spelled out in our marriage, due to my husband’s magnetic attraction to adrenaline. Before we married he dabbled in skydiving, motorcycle riding, go-cart racing, nighttime surfing and who knows what else. To this day he won’t watch a movie unless something blows up in it. (As I type this he is in the other room watching the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Why can’t he just appreciate the Food Channel, like I do?)

But somehow, being rear-ended by a car didn’t seem like an act of stupidity, and I really did want to see for myself that he was okay. When I arrived at the ER I told the triage nurse that I was with the cyclist. Turns out she thought I said I was with the “psychotic”, whom I think was the guy in the back of the ER yelling his guts out. (What a nice wife I must have seemed like. “Yes, I’m with the psychotic. Can I see him now please?”)

When we got the mix-up straightened out, I was let into the ER to visit my husband, complete with a C-collar on, lying on a gurney. I must share my appreciation for Officer Davis of the Culver City Police Department, who not only drove my husband’s bike to the hospital for me, but also assured me he was okay and put the bike in my car for me.

“Nice work” I joked as I looked him over. “If you needed attention all you had to do was ask.” After some unremarkable x-rays and a slightly scary fainting episode (I have never seen my husband look so pasty), he was released.

We are very blessed and I thank God that what could have been a heinous accident turned into something relatively minor. Sometimes I think, “What if this elderly driver had hit the gas pedal instead? What if this man had run over him after he fell in front of the car? What if the helmet hadn’t worked so well, or got hit at just the wrong angle?” The list of scary thoughts is long, and my gratitude is great.

So is this what it’s going to be like every time he goes for a ride now? Will I wait, tense, by the phone? Should I ask him to stop riding? The truth is, there are risks to everything we do. We can’t live in a bubble, and I can’t stop him from doing something he loves so much. All we can do is our own due diligence—wear the helmet, use caution on the road, and pray for a good outcome. Perhaps I’ll add a special prayer that it doesn’t occur to him to try bungee jumping…A woman can only take so much…