‘All I want this Christmas is to get back on my bike’
Less than two months after a collision in which she was nearly killed, cyclist Irena Ossola is determined to ride again
Try as she might, Irena Ossola can’t make her hands do what her mind commands them to.
With the morning sunlight streaming through the window of a downtown Santa Fe juice bar last week, the 29-year-old squinted through short strands of blond hair at her swollen and scarred appendages, rotating them slowly as if trying to find answers.
“If you’re asking,” she said without looking up, “all I want this Christmas is to get back on my bike. I can’t do that until I get these back.”
A 2006 graduate of St. Michael’s High School and the only child of an Italian-born father and a mother who’s native to New Mexico, Ossola kept it simple when talking about the seven weeks that led to that moment, when all she wanted was the use of her hands and the freedom to be on her bike.
A professional cyclist with a career based largely in Europe, Ossola had her world turned upside down less than two months ago, when she nearly lost her life after colliding with a vehicle on the north side of Santa Fe.
Aside from the broken bones and deep scars, the crash has caused short-term memory loss and left her with an uncertain future in a sport that has been her sole focus
‘I was out riding my bike and doing something I love, and the next thing I know I’m waking up and four weeks of my life are gone,’ Irena Ossola said of a Nov. 10 collision with a vehicle that left her seriously injured. MICHAELA MEANEY/THE NEW MEXICAN
since 2012. Simple things like zipping up her coat and brushing her teeth, getting dressed and texting — they are all huge chores now as her body fights to recover.
“Irena is the most determined athlete I’ve coached and, honestly, if anyone can make this happen, it’s probably her,” said Lenny Gurule, who was her high school cross-country coach. “Once she sets her mind to something, there’s nothing you can do to stop her. That’s always been her way. You can look at her now and wonder how she’ll ever do it, and all I’ll say is, ‘Just watch.’ ”
Ossola was at the end of a four-hour training ride Nov. 10 when she was approaching the roundabout on West Alameda Street and Siler Road. She’d followed a familiar path that had taken her well past the state penitentiary and back along N.M. 599.
As she pedaled downhill on West Alameda toward the roundabout, an SUV came out of the intersection from the opposite direction. The vehicle turned left onto Quail View Lane, cutting directly in front of Ossola. The driver said he never saw her coming because the sun was behind her. Nobody has been charged in the collision.
Ossola made contact near the front right tire well. The impact launched her off her bike and over the body of the SUV. Both of her thumbs were dislocated, and the impact is thought to have broken nearly every bone in her right hand and a few in her left.
She landed face-first on the road, the majority of the force being absorbed by her upper body.
“Cyclists always use their hands to [brace] for hitting the ground, but we think she was already so badly hurt that she couldn’t raise her hands to do that,” said her father, Ambrogio Ossola. “All of her weight came down on her head and face.”
Ossola suffered severe head trauma, and her left humerus was broken. Doctors made an 8-inch incision in her biceps to insert a plate that holds the bone together.
She received a compound fracture of the right index finger and had to have surgery on both hands, each of which remain swollen with profound scars. Both of her clavicles were snapped and both lungs collapsed, forcing emergency personnel to insert chest tubes to keep her alive.
“The EMTs and trauma teams saved her life,” said her mother, Robin Lucero. “Everyone on the scene, the people at [Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center] and UNM [Hospital], she wouldn’t be here without them.”
All of Ossola’s front teeth were knocked out, and her nose was broken. Lucero estimates the dental work alone will cost $10,000.
The orbital socket on Ossola’s left eye was shattered, and deep gashes above and below the eye were so bad that they are the first things Ambrogio Ossola remembers noticing when he walked into the emergency room to see her.
“Her face was a mask of blood, and there was a hole so big you could fit a golf ball in it,” he said, fighting back the tears as he spoke. “They had this inflatable blanket over her, and the only part of her I could touch was her foot. I rubbed it, and it felt like an icicle.”
Irena Ossola’s recollection is that she was in a medically induced coma for 10 days, but her father said that’s not the case. It’s a byproduct of her memory loss, that details from some days fade as quickly as they come.
“One of the doctors told me they can fix anything on the outside — the broken bones, the skin, the nose,” Ambrogio Ossola said. “The one thing they can’t fix is the brain, and this is a person who suffered a serious brain injury. That she’s still alive and doing this good is a miracle.”
Irena Ossola was airlifted from Christus St. Vincent to University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque and remained unconscious for well over a week. She slowly came to and spent another week at UNM Hospital, then another two undergoing rehabilitation at Lovelace.
She didn’t return home to Santa Fe until this month.
“I was out riding my bike and doing something I love, and the next thing I know I’m
waking up and four weeks of my life are gone,” Ossola said. “One day everything’s normal, and the next it’s after Thanksgiving and it’s all changed.”
To understand Ossola’s frustration, one has to visit her past. She was a three-time cross-country champion at St. Michael’s, winning the state title each year from 2003-05. She parlayed that into four years at Columbia University in New York City. Her Ivy League education helped land her a job at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2010.
After about a year of working on computer simulations in an office, she’d had enough.
“I knew I wasn’t meant to spend my time at a desk,” she said. “I had to do something outside.”
She dropped everything, including a government paycheck, to move to Europe and start a professional career as a runner. She settled in Oltrona al Lago, a small village in northern Italy that’s a short bike ride from the Swiss border. Surrounded by the Alps and lined with streets made more for bicycles than cars, it was a place Ossola came to love as much as her roots in Santa Fe.
She still refers to her part-time residence there as “my house” and counts dozens of locals among her closest of friends.
Growing up as the daughter of an immigrant, Ossola’s first language was Italian. She and her father still have every conversation in his native tongue. Over the years, she also has become fluent in French and Spanish, and she knows just enough Chinese to get by.
Her running career ended not long after she got to Europe, but it was in Italy that she discovered her passion for bikes.
Her father was a competitive racer in his youth, and Ambrogio Ossola said he and his wife noticed early on their daughter’s love for competition. The family owned a coffee shop in downtown Santa Fe for a few years, and Irena at age 6 told her dad that she wanted to jog home after helping him close for the night.
“I thought she would stop and ask for my help once we got to the Plaza,” he said. “She never stopped. In a lot of ways, she has kept going her whole life.”
Sharing stories about her past gave Irena Ossola a chance to divert her attention away from the pain for just a few moments. The memories brought a smile to her face, one that’s covered with pink scars that extend above and below her left eye.
In so many ways, those things don’t matter as much to her as they do to others. What she wants is simple; the thrill of her bike and the chance to avoid the searing pain she gets from doing the simplest of things. Her broken collarbones cause shoulder pains. The metal pins protruding from both hands often snag on her clothing and send shocks up and down her arms.
She refuses to take pain medication for any of it, even saying no to over-the-counter drugs like acetaminophen and ibuprofen. What she’s good at is mastering a singular focus that makes her remarkably persistent and, as she says, hopelessly stubborn.
“I’m going to try to get what I want no matter how hard I try,” she said. “I don’t know how else to do it.”
She pushes aside her pain as if it were an empty cereal bowl at breakfast. She snuffs out her anger much the same way.
“I don’t really have time to be angry at anything,” she said.
With that, she paused to field a question about what she would say if given an audience with the person whose ill-fated left turn caused her entire life to change course. It was the only time in more than an hour of sharing her story that she showed any sign of emotion.
“I guess the only thing I would ask is, ‘Why?’ ” she said, tears welling up in her blue eyes. “I can’t remember a month of my life, and I guess all I want to know is why it happened, why me?”