Unsure whether he wanted to go into the US Army, 16-year-old Jason Fostine-DeSilva actually wanted to break a leg, or similar, in a bike accident to avoid making an instant decision whether to enlist.

Unfortunately the admittedly "wayward individual" got much more than he bargained for back in 1986 when he went headfirst into a taxi after being thrown from a bike driven by a drunken friend.

While his friend got a sprained ankle and a night in jail, Jason suffered a punctured lung, a shattered shoulder blade and permanent head injuries which have left him with slurred speech and the effects of Ataxia, which gives him jerky, unco-ordinated body movements.

"I was a wayward individual back then," he told The Royal Gazette.

"I sort of knew I should go into the army, it would have been for the best, but I wasn't sure. I wanted to break a leg to delay going in.

"Isn't it ironic that I should then end up breaking a few ribs, shattering my shoulder and damaging my cerebellum."

He spent three months in a coma, nine months in a Bermuda hospital and another 18 months in and out of US hospitals - wiping out famliy members' saving as he did so.

"You don't realise the effect it has on other people when something like this happens," continued Jason, now a 32-year-old who has shunned the option to return to motorbikes, instead choosing to travel the Island on a pedal cycle.

"I am the one who has to continue living like this, but people in the family have said to me 'your accident has affected the whole family, it has made things hard for all of us. It has used other people's savings'."

Life has not been easy for Jason, who will pay the penalty for the fateful night of November 15, 1986, for the rest of his life.

"I am like a baby again," he said.

"If you watch a baby, it will be standing up and then fall over for no reason - well that happens to me. I'm standing up and then I fall down - and wonder sometimes how it happens.

"At 17 I was peeing the bed all over again and sometimes I wondered 'why can't I have just died?'"

And Jason believes, in a way, he did the night he came off that bike. "I did die in that accident," he said matter-of-factly.

"I am not the same person anymore. I can't walk as fast, I can't talk as fast. I have old friends who don't like to see me. They don't know how to deal with me any more. I'm a different Jason but I'm a better person now, most definitely."

Each time he picks up The Royal Gazette and reads of another road accident it reminds him - if he needed reminding - of his accident and how his life has changed.

And during his journeys around the Island on his push bike he sees many things on the Island's dangerous roads that upset him.

"I go pretty slowly because I have to," he said. "But I would anyway. I could ride a scooter but I don't want to, I would rather stay on my push bike.

"When you go slow you see everything everyone else is doing. I see people, and the things they do on the road, and think 'you are going to end up like me if you keep going like that' - but I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy."

People constantly tell Jason that he should go into schools and talk to the drivers of the future about the dangers on the road but he doesn't think that is the solution.

"At school, I heard two or three talks like that," he said solemnly.

"I didn't pay any attention and I don't think other kids will."

Rather than looking back, Jason is more concerned about looking forward.

He has now left his job as a cleaner at the Aquarium and is studying e-commerce at Bermuda College. His long term plan is to save up and move to university in Indiana while still clinging to a distant hope that he will still be able to live a normal life.

"Things are getting more advanced medically," he said wistfully.

"Maybe one day they will come up with some DNA injection they can give me from maybe an athlete with amazing co-ordination. Maybe that could solve my problems."

But rather than sitting around waiting for that to happen, he instead spends hours in the gym every day battling to keep his muscles from atrophying and trying to build himself up.

He comes across as an incredibly driven individual, another irony given that his problems began the night that he was driven.

"We were coming from a party in Warwick and heading into town along South Shore Road by Coral Beach. We were leading the group and we started to speed up and the bike skidded..."