Can You Hear Me Now?

At the far end of a 100-yard straightaway on the path where we were running, we saw a woman's bike go down as she navigated a slightly downhill, 90-degree turn. Though she was only moving about 10 MPH, her body hurtled head-over-heels over the bars and she landed hard on her back. Then the guy riding ahead of her plunged his bike headlong into a ditch while trying to turn his rig around and aid his fallen riding partner.

The path soon led us to the scene. Diesel, an M.D., looked down at the stunned woman rider and asked a question designed to gauge the respondent's level of coherency: "What happened?"

Gasping for breath, the 50-ish woman, who seemed to be wearing a lot of makeup for an early morning ride, answered: "Are you a doctor?"

Diesel nodded.

"Not an animal doctor, I hope."

"No."

"Well, then I was talking on the phone to my son and he was arguing with me about going somewhere and he made me so mad I stopped paying attention and crashed." She rolled over and faced her muddy husband, who by then had managed to crawl out of the ditch: "And we didn't even wear our helmets today, honey."

When a bored ambulance driver who happened to be driving past the scene pulled up in his vehicle, we saw our opportunity to break free. As we resumed our run, I wondered aloud what the crash sounded like to the lady's son and whether the phone was still on the ground.

"What does she have against vets?" responded Diesel. "What she doesn't know is they know a hell of a lot more about the body's systems than most doctors."