Our freind Joe "Dr. MotoKawi" had a run-in with the dark side of stunting a few weeks ago. While our sport can be relatively safe, crashes do happen and it's good to be prepared for the worst. Here Joe explains what happened and how he started his road to recovery. We will be checking in with him again soon, but you can follow his progress and send him some words of encouragement on his Tumblr or Twitter.

Whether you are a seasoned professional stuntrider or just starting out in the sport it's a guarantee that you will see and be involved your fair share of crashes. Crashing and stuntriding go hand and hand like water and swimming. While most of us try to not think about the negative aspects of crashing it is however important to give it some thought as some wrecks are avoidable. Especially when you are learning new tricks, or just starting stuntriding. 

I recently was involved in a nasty accident at my local Sunday spot while practicing wheelies, luckily for me I was with a group of seasoned crashers and we immediately stopped and left for the hospital. My crash was captured on film and it allowed me to go back and actually see what happen, because it all happened so fast. All I remember was I did a quick jump to spreader and when I landed in the tank I grabbed a handful of gas resulting in a situation known as "whiskey throttle" and I hit the panic button and tried to jump off the side on the bike, but unfortunately for me I ended up just laying the bike down onto my foot and exploding my left foot. Going back and watching the video it is clear that i was riding too close (they were in my line) to the stairs and am lucky I got off the bike before I hit them.

Once I hit the ground I knew my foot was broken, it swelled up immediately and the panic started to set in. The guys picked me up and took me to Rick’s truck, I laid on my back with my foot elevated and hanging out of the window. You could see the insane amount of blood I was losing and we knew I needed to get to hospital fast. Also lucky for me, we were about 2 miles from the emergency room. From wreck to ER was about 15 minutes total and I am so thankful for all the guys that helped load all my stuff for me while I was gone.

At the hospital they removed all my clothes and took me straight into surgery to clean up my foot and see what had happened. Once I awoke from my surgery they told me I had exploded my foot and due to the loss of bone they were going to have to do a bone graft and put a cadaver bone in my foot to try and rebuild it. Now I have a cadaver bone and a bunch of pins in my foot and am praying my body does not reject it and hoping my bones start to fuse back together again. This is going to be a long recovery and at this time I'm not even worried about riding again I just am hoping to be able to walk and run again first.

-Joe