This afternoon, I completed an insurance form for the cycling club. I don’t really understand what it’s for. I don’t see why there would be an insurance policy that would pay anybody other than me (the club didn’t incur any costs from the accident), but I’ve already signed a waiver freeing the club from any liability.
The form wasn’t particularly remarkable except for two things. First, it had checkboxes for 21 body parts, and I was to indicate which had been injured. I ended up checking just under half of them (10). However, most of the injuries were very minor, such as light scratches on the front of my neck and my right ear. The second thing was that I was asked to indicate whether my injuries were minor or serious, and I wasn’t sure what the answer was. While a broken jaw certainly isn’t fun, plenty of people recover from it, and relatively quickly. I assumed that there was some serious legal definition of “serious injury,” and I looked around and found that I was right, at least in the State of New York. A Google search turned up a page on the New York serious injury threshold:
“Serious injury” means a personal injury which results in death; dismemberment; significant disfigurement; a fracture; loss of a fetus; permanent loss of use of a body organ, member, function or system; permanent consequential limitation of use of a body organ or member; significant limitation of use of a body function or system, or a medically determined injury or impairment of a non permanent nature which prevents the injured person from performing substantially all of the material acts which constitute such person’s usual and customary daily activities for not less that ninety days during the one hundred eighty days immediately following the occurrence of the injury or impairment.
I’m nowhere near New York, and neither is the insurer, but this was good enough for me. While most of that wouldn’t describe any of my injuries, I definitely have a fracture.
Shock and Jaw 
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