WGN9's Tom Negovan 'just glad to be alive' after motorcycle crash


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Posted by chicagomedia.org on September 10, 2009 at 13:58:11:

WGN-Ch. 9's Tom Negovan 'just glad to be alive' after motorcycle crash

Tom Negovan returned earlier this year from reporting in Afghanistan for Chicago's WGN-Ch. 9 without so much as a scratch. Riding his motorcycle on the city's northwest side over the weekend, he was nearly killed.

"I'm just glad to be alive," Negovan said from his hospital bed Wednesday night, a day after undergoing two hours of spinal surgery. "I feel like the luckiest man in all of Chicago."

Besides suffering two broken vertebrae, Negovan required 19 staples for lacerations in his back of scalp and was left with assorted bumps and bruises after a collision with a car making a left turn in front of him Saturday on Harlem Avenue. Fortunately, his face was unscathed.

Negovan and his wife said that doctors expect him to make a full recovery within the next three months or so. He has been been fitted for a back brace could be back at work within a few weeks, they said. His Buell motorcycle, however, was totaled.

"The good news is he's going to be great, so the worst is over," said Susanna Negovan, who is editor of Michigan Avenue magazine and formerly wrote the Susanna's Night Out column in the Chicago Sun-Times. "He was hit head on. It was brutal. It was a brutal few days, but he had surgery and everything went really well, so the nightmare is over.

"It was a scary accident," she said. "The particular injuries he had were very dangerous and a close call, but not permanent. No nerve damage, no brain damage, no spinal cord damage. We just got really, really lucky. Every doctor we saw over the last few days, and we saw dozens, have all started the conversation with, 'You are so, so lucky!'"

Negovan, who has been riding motorcycles for around 20 years, said he was not wearing a helmet at the time of the accident. "Nine times out of 10, maybe more than that, I'm wearing a helmet," he said. "It was just a nice sunny day. I thought I'd take a quick ride without it and, sure enough, that's the day."

Negovan said he planned a short zip up the Kennedy Expressway. But with traffic snarled, he got off at Harlem and headed south. The car with which he collided was headed north and turned west.

"I thought I would take a nice leisurely cruise through my wife's former neighborhood, and it turned out to be anything but," he said. "The moment of impact is little bit of a black spot in my memory. I remember seeing him approaching and seeing him making a left-hand turn in front of me and trying to avoid him. And then I remember being on the pavement."

Negovan was recruited to Chicago Tribune parent Tribune Co.'s WGN as a noon anchor in 2005 after three years as a weekend anchor and investigative reporter at CBS-owned KYW-TV in Philadelphia. He became Channel 9's primary backup anchor last year when Steve Sanders moved to the midday news as co-anchor from the 9 p.m. broadcast to make room in prime time for the arrival of Mark Suppelsa.

A little more than three months ago, Negovan spent two weeks embedded in Afghanistan with Illinois soldiers there for a series of Channel 9 reports, as well as half-hour special and a blog on the station's Web site. He also wrote a piece that appeared in the Chicago Tribune based on what he saw.

Danger found him closer to home.

"If you ask me, no more bike riding, but he'll be the biggest helmet advocate you've ever seen," Susanna Negovan said.

"That was a beautiful motorcycle, too. I'm going to miss it," Tom said. "But out of respect for my wife, first Afghanistan and now this, I think I'll put the bikes away."

-Phil Rosenthal, Chicago Tribune Posted at 12:18:59 AM


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