So here's what happened in the hopes that maybe you can learn something from it, but that with any luck, you'll never actually need any of this information.

External injuries are actually healing quite nicely by the way, not too bad, you can't see the bone anymore, that's a positive internals still have some time to go first and very important, I wanna start by saying that things could have gone much, much worse.

I was fortunate enough to walk away with one night in a moderately questionable hospital, only a single fully broken bone, but it's although that bone is a very small bone that broke its impact is unfortunately large, like for example, I may never play the he said again, 10 years of building a life here in Japan around that instrument and so it was night, it was dark, I was coming home from setting up the studio here in Akihabara and heading home, I lived near Tokyo Tower, so it's really only about 20 minutes away by bicycle or by electric scooter and that night I was using this here electric scooter.

Now in all fairness, this particular bike is actually fairly well, it especially at night in Japan, any self propelled motorized vehicle like this actually needs to be registered as an under 50 cc vehicle, hence the license plate and the little Tokyo Tower down there and it needs to follow all the normal rules like brake lights as well as mirrors and turn signals for the record.

This is not sponsored.

I don't think you can buy this brand outside of Japan, but it doesn't amazing job at lighting up the road at night, which is one of the reasons I originally felt safe with it, but based on Japanese Ganske or under 50 cc law, you cannot use the sidewalk.

You have to use the left most one m of the roadway to ride these.

I am right around the area of the Imperial Palace, well within my one m and I remember hearing the sound of a truck coming up from behind me.

Next thing I know it hits me, I am flying through the air, I hit the ground and remember a taxi who must have been right behind the truck swerving to avoid me and me thinking I just need to stand up right now and be as visible as possible.

Now luckily tend to wear both a reflective vest and have a reflective strap on my bag.

I definitely recommend it also just a little tiny blood warning on this one.

Nothing heavy but the warning is there in case you're squeamish!

I at first did not think that the truck driver was going to stop.

It looked like he was just going to keep going and as my head was slowly exploding and I'm trying to wrap my mind around that and what would happen next.

He came to a stop thankfully he jumped out of the truck.

He came running up.

He took responsibility was super apologetic and he called an ambulance and at first I tried to stop him.

No, I don't need an ambulance.

You see to me it looks like I just had a bit of a scratched elbow.

Yeah, it might have been dripping a little bit, but it didn't seem that bad.

You see the injuries I had hadn't quite set in at that point.

But over the next couple of minutes I would most certainly slowly become very aware that it was more than just a scratched out.

This, this was just the beginning of the truck itself was one of the power line trucks, one of the ones that had the big buckets on top.

I do want to say that the driver of the vehicle was both very kind and very stressed, definitely didn't come off as intentional and I didn't want to add to the obvious multitude of fears and stresses that he was most certainly experiencing at that point.

So I just chatted with him and tried to keep things light and reassuring until the police arrived and oh boy, did the police arrive?

Like if you have ever had an accident or been in some kind of incident or even seen an incident in Japan, you will know that police officers arrive in droves at first it started off with two officers on bicycles, then a few more officers, then a few more than if you and I don't even know how many array at the end, but every single officer or set of officers had to take a look at my driver's license, copy down my name and address and phone number, asked me about my work sometime after that is when the ambulance arrived and it was around this point when the ambulance arrived that I slowly had started to realize just how bad things were.

So in addition to the very obvious elbow injury, I had also come to realize that I was missing both clothing and skin from the entire right side of my body.

And by this point I also realized that I had completely snapped my pinky finger.

I just couldn't move it.

And little by little the pain was also starting to set in and then the friendly officer came, What a great guy.

Now a lot has happened and I've learned so many things since this accident.

So in the grand scheme, this one officer was just a drop in the bucket, but there's always that one person and I'll share that with you right after I give some love to this week's sponsor.

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So I'm in the ambulance at this point we've done initial care decided what hospital we're going to go to.

And all of a sudden this officer that I've never seen before pokes his head in from the side looks me right in the eyes and says by the way do you have a visa?

I'm just thinking here here we go.

Here we go.

And I said I have a joke in which is permanent residency.

And he instantly snaps back with are you carrying your passport?

Now?

I know that this may not have been the best approach but it was late.

I was incredibly tired and everything that had just I looked at him and I said are you carrying your passport?

Who carries their passport snaps back almost immediately saying you know it's illegal for you not to be carrying some form of I.

D.

And I said well you know I have already given my license and other forms of I.

D.

To every single officer there.

Why don't you go confirm with one of them?

He said I want to see your I.

D.

On my own I.

Hand into my license.

He disappeared for a bit.

He came back with my I.

D.

And with a brand new line of questions which almost seemed like they were there for the sole purpose of seeing if he could trigger me or push me into getting upset and it was at this moment that the ambulance drivers turned to him and said sorry that is enough we need to take him to the hospital.

Now, if you have any more questions, this is the hospital will be at and they just closed the door on him, looked at me and gave me a little smirk, huge prompts and love to those ambulance drivers, You guys are amazing.

You probably never see this, but I just want you to know that.

I appreciate the heck out of that, wow!

Now for some extra fun I had the good fortune of them bringing me out to a training or university hospital, which means I was the training subject for a young budding doctor which I don't mind.

But keeping in mind this was really late.

It was definitely past midnight, maybe closer to one or two in the morning and when you have a traffic accident this may be the same in other countries but they run an exhaustive number of tests, they do this like full body all over pressure.

It's very uncomfortable as a test.

And I had more X rays in the that one single night than I have ever had or may ever have in my entire life combined.

To the point where I actually stopped them part way through and asked them if there was something wrong with the X ray machine.

My hip alone, the number of different angles and x rays they took.

But that wasn't even the most shocking part.

Now it is an er and this may be standard practice.

I'm not used to er s but when they went to wrap up my arm, no cleaning, no ointment, no cover of any sort.

They just wrapped it in gauze the way it was.

And I remember thinking well they probably should have cleaned that and this this is this is gonna hurt when it comes off and the spoiler alert, it did hurt when it came off.

And then after that I was sent off to do the payment and most health care in Japan is covered by insurance to a certain level.

But because it's going to be the insurance company of the driver or his company or whatever, I had to pay everything upfront and then they pay me back.

I was in that hospital for hours.

I don't know how many has to run And for american viewers this may sound like a small number but for me here in Japan where you can go and get an X ray and a CT scan and everything and walk over like a 20 some odd dollar bill when they gave me a bill for nearly $1000.

I was like also I'm from Canada where health care is free.

And also because health care is free, you would avoid going to an emergency room at all costs because they're always crowded and takes them forever to get you on the logistical side.

They also gave me a cd that had all the x rays and showed the brakes and all this.

Well as an introduction letter to a nearby clinic where I would then start going on a near daily basis.

Unfortunately because this wasn't properly cleaned out at the E.

R.

It got really bad for a while in the bandages had to be changed out like twice a day.

And although my injuries seemed really minor on the surface like a broken pinky smashed up elbow and some road rash, it turns out they were going to have a much bigger impact on my overall life for the foreseeable future than I ever could have imagined.

And as I was starting to process and understand and learn about that the insurance company started calling on top of the obvious figuring out what the payment and the settlement, all of that's gonna be the other thing that the insurance company needs to do is figure out that I guess what would be called kind of division of fault is what we might call it in english.

It is basically a breakdown of what percentage of fault falls on each of the parties.

And in a situation like this where someone's hit from behind, it's usually the person who did the hitting that bears the fault.

But that actually reminds me the day after the accident I went down down to the police station and spent a very large portion of the day with the police officers.

We jumped in a police van I guess went down to the scene of the accident.

They laid out cones, they got pictures, they went all the different little spots.

We basically laid out a step by step of exactly what happened in the accident.

While things were still fresh in my head, then went back to the police station, drew it all out on a map, wrote a full statement.

I had to sign that statement.

I didn't get to keep any of it, but in the process of doing that and having all the back and forth with the insurance companies all started to become very busy and overwhelming.

And a friend recommended to me to look into getting a lawyer, telling me that if I get a good lawyer more often than not, they'll only take a small fee if they managed to increase the settlement.

So at the end, there's no minus to me, I did some research and saw that actually as a non native speech, having somebody to represent me in a situation like this might not actually be the worst thing ever.

And so I brought on a lawyer, but the entire process basically starts now and looks like it could go for as long as the next year or even more until everything's decided and we know how long it's gonna take for the injuries to heal.

And really, really the injuries are the sad part because okay, if you take a look at this side of the studio here, this entire side of the studio is built for shamisen, if you don't know what shamisen is.

Shamisen is a three stringed japanese instruments, it is this right here and it sounds absolutely awesome.

Let me move that here.

When I came to Japan, I had one really big dream and it was to learn Shamisen, become apprentice of two big players called the Yoshi brothers and for the last decade I've been learning directly under the older of the two Yoshi brothers.

In fact, the three of us have even played together on tv.

I have beed shamisen plus she's my own shamisen plus she's and I built this entire section of my studio around shamisen.

And unfortunately when you play you need to put a Bochy right in here and hold it like this.

The way you hold the Bochy is very important and as you're striking the shamisen which happens repeatedly fast and very hard.

The risk of it re breaking my finger as that is the exact spot that my finger is broken is incredibly high and the doctors have told me that realistically, if I don't want to risk breaking my finger again, I might not ever be playing shamisen again, which obviously is a bit of a shock to hear.

On one hand, I definitely don't want to give up hope.

But on the other hand, if it's broken, there's one more kind of issue that I suffer, which is, if I don't have full range of my hand, the next big step, the next big goal in my life which was to get my pilot's license to do flight training.

I won't be able to do that either as not having full range of my hand invalidates my pilot medical.

And so since this happened, I haven't actually been able to go back to Kagoshima and do any flight training because I've been doing rehabilitation and trying to, it's getting better.

It's almost like I can actually open and close my hand now which is something that two weeks ago I could not do.

Also shameless plug the shamisen plus she's are soft and wonderful and once they're fully sold out they will not be made again.

They'll be linked in the description box below and they're one of my favorite things that I have ever made, let's be shiny, somebody's, I have been understandably cautious on the road ever since the accident as well.

I cycled to the studio, come back pretty much every single day but still get really nervous any time a vehicle, especially a large vehicle passes me but I have not touched that kick board scooter whatever you wanna call it since the accident, which is unfortunate because I have two years of prepaid insurance on that thing and I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure that I'm not gonna use it anymore.

But that may be for the best and I genuinely hope that you never need to use any of the information that's in this video, but hopefully the entire process is there at least at least my process and if anything does happen and you need to hire a lawyer or something, there are plenty of English speaking lawyers just make sure that you get one that has the system that if they don't win a higher settlement then you don't get charged for that because then there's no additional risk for you and there's somebody to represent you and take care of all that difficult paperwork and everything.