Sideline Stories: Liam Somers, Cyclist, LifeFlight of Maine Patient

An avid cyclist, I was visiting my hometown of Bar Harbor and headed to Acadia National Park for a weekend of riding with friends. This particular morning I was out on my own for a quick training ride.

The sun sitting just above the horizon, I was keeping my head low to shield my eyes from the glare as I pedaled up a long gradual incline, then I headed down a quick descent topping out at about 23mph. With my head down because of the sun, I didn’t see that a car had pulled off the road and was parked in the righthand lane. Never seeing this car, I crashed into the back of it at full speed. The force of the impact catapulted me head first through the back window, the glass cutting deeply into my neck and chest. I bounced back out of the car and immediately knew I was in trouble, as blood gushed from my neck.

Passersby called for help and one heroic man applied pressure to my neck wound to try and stem the blood loss. I remember thinking, “There’s so much blood. How am I going to survive this?”

I started doing breathing exercises to calm myself down and slow my heart rate, in hopes of limiting my blood loss as best I could. Soon after, several more heroes arrived and began to attend to my injuries, one of whom was a new nurse at Mercy Hospital, who just happened to be visiting to run the Mount Desert Island marathon and the other was a flight medic visiting Acadia from Florida. I couldn’t have been more fortunate for this level of care.

The glass from the windshield had sliced through several blood vessels and arteries in my neck and I needed surgery from trauma specialists, but the closest ones were more than 50 miles away in Bangor. A ground ambulance would take more than 90 minutes to cover that distance, but the LifeFlight of Maine helicopter could do it much faster and I was running out of time.

The closest helicopter, based in Bangor, was already on a call, so the Lewiston-based aircraft headed for Seal Harbor, arriving just minutes later. The flight crew assessed my injuries and prepared me for the 18-minute flight to Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor. There, a world-renowned surgeon happened to be on call and he and his team set out to repair the damaged blood vessels in my neck and stop the bleeding. They intubated me to assist with breathing, as my airway had all but closed off due to the trauma to my neck. They then placed me in a medically induced coma for 2 days to allow for the swelling in my neck to subside.

Thanks to the quick trip, amazing heroes who showed up and worked to keep me alive and the incredible and experienced care of the flight crew from LifeFlight of Maine, I made a full recovery (and many new friends) with just a few lingering scars to remind me of that fateful bike ride.