BOULDER — It wasn’t the most romantic marriage proposal. Adelaide Perr doesn’t even remember the moment, but the setting was unusually poignant.
Perr lay semi-conscious in the intensive care unit of a Longmont hospital when Kennett Peterson proposed to her on Oct. 18, 2014. Hours earlier she had been seriously injured on her bike while training for an Ironman triathlon when a car pulled in front of her while she was riding at an estimated 30-35 mph on U.S. 36 near Lyons. She tried to stop, hitting her brakes and leaving 50 feet of ski marks, but she slid into the driver’s side of the car. The left side of her face struck the window and shattered it.
“That night after the first surgery, we were all standing around,” Peterson recalled recently. “Her eyes were closed. Her face was enormous from the swelling, huge black stitches, blood everywhere. Someone asked her, ‘Do you want a Vitamix?’ She squeezed my hand, and it was like, ‘Whoa, she’s actually sort of responsive.’ I asked if she would marry me. She squeezed my hand way harder, with like a nod, a tiny nod. She doesn’t remember that, but I’m not making it up.”
The Boulder couple, both of whom are elite triathletes, was married the following February. She was still in the process of a long recovery that was as emotional — complicated by bipolar disorder that preceded the accident and post-traumatic stress disorder that followed it — as well as physical. They have since returned to competition.
Perr still bears scars on her face and in her psyche, but her ordeal has a legacy. She was involved in helping to pass a Colorado law that stiffened penalties for motorists who cause accidents like hers, testifying in the House and Senate for a bill Gov. Jared Polis signed into law in 2019, and in October she published a book that came out on the six-year anniversary of the accident.
“There is a mental recovery that is just part of the adventure we call life, but it’s not often talked about,” Perr said recently at a north Boulder coffee shop. “It’s different than the physical recovery. It has a different timeline, it’s way worse, and a lot of people don’t talk about that. I mean, it’s my story, but Kennett was impacted. The police officer who showed up to the scene was impacted. When something happens to one person, other people need support, too.”
One of the few things she remembers from the scene of the accident was an EMT saying, “Her face is peeled off” as she was being loaded into the ambulance.
Peterson, who was on a ride of his own that day, rode up on the scene after she had been taken away. He noticed her water bottle in a ditch, started to panic, and heard someone say, “I think her name was Adelaide.” When a police officer said he wasn’t sure if she was alive, Peterson rode his bike to the hospital as fast as he could pedal.
“Crying and screaming the whole time,” Peterson said.
Perr went home after 11 days in the intensive care unit, earlier than doctors wanted her to leave. For weeks, pieces of the driver’s side window that had been buried in her face worked their way to the surface, and she had to be fed through a stomach tube for more than a month. It would be five to six months before she began to feel somewhat normal.
Emotional recovery took a lot longer. She had been diagnosed as bipolar two years earlier, and in the aftermath of the accident, she worried about how pain medication might affect her brain.
“She was panicked that a bipolar depression would set in, and it did, off and on, for months,” Peterson said. “She would be lying in bed, crying, off and on all day.”
Stress from the legal case against the 52-year-old man who caused the accident made things worse. He was charged with misdemeanor careless driving resulting in injury and sentenced in May 2015 to 200 hours of community service and a $1,000 fine.
“Stress brings out bipolar symptoms,” Perr said. “It makes you more likely to have episodes. Also, exercise is a huge coping mechanism for me, and all of a sudden I couldn’t bike ride. I couldn’t do anything.”
Perr and Peterson both say they experienced PTSD, which sometimes expresses itself as heightened fear on their bikes. When she crashed in 2017 and broke an elbow, the emotional impact “set her off for three or four months,” Peterson said.
“When I crashed on my own, breaking an elbow in the grand scheme is not that big a deal,” Perr said. “I didn’t have surgery. But the trauma therapist explained to me, I’d had only had one crash prior to that, and it was life-threatening, so when I crashed again my body went into this, ‘You’re going to die’ response.”
The driver who caused the first accident received only four points on his license, which was the penalty under the law then. Under the Vulnerable Road User Law Perr helped get passed, the penalty now is 12 points — resulting in the suspension of driving privileges for a year — if the driver is cited for careless driving resulting in serious bodily injury to a vulnerable road user.
“She was a passionate advocate who testified very well in front of the committees,” said Perr’s attorney, Brad Tucker, who is president of the board of directors of Bicycle Colorado. “This was a real breakthrough. The problem we used to have as vulnerable road users is that the same careless driving conduct that can otherwise be pretty innocuous – a driver that might hit another car and just cause a fender-bender – if they hit you or me while we are on our bike can be awfully bad.”
Perr shares her story to help others experiencing trauma like hers.
“That’s the hope, that it makes it a little easier for other people,” Perr said. “The emotional recovery, it’s still ongoing. Some days everything is better. Some days, you go out for a ride, you have a really traumatic experience again, and you’re back to square one.”
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