I got into an accident at a crosswalk at the intersection between Acton Street and Delaware Street on Tuesday, September 10, 2019, around 7 PM Pacific Time.
I was walking back from the North Berkeley BART to my residence. I was working in the north-south direction (crossing Delaware Street) on the east side. The intersection is a four-way intersection controlled by STOP signs. The driver was driving on Delaware Street from east to west.
Before I started crossing, I noticed that the driver was approaching the intersection but was slowing down and heading to a stop. Therefore, I started crossing.
The driver did stop at the intersection (though I don't think it was a complete stop, but the speed did go down to probably 2 mph or so); however, the driver restarted just as I crossed the path of the car. This means that the driver had just restarted and was driving very slowly (my guess is around 5 mph or so).
I was hit and fell forward on my right side. The driver braked immediately, so I was not run over.
The car was a Hyundai Elantra. The driver provided some contact details.
The driver explained that although she'd seen me, she thought I wasn't crossing, and she failed to notice me because the sun was in her eyes; as mentioned above, she was driving westward and it was near the end of the day, so this is consistent.
Since I fell on my right side, my main injuries were on my right. The main visible injury was to my right arm. It started off as a bruise and started bleeding; I cleaned the wound and covered it in a few bandages. I also had a bruise a little below the waist on my right side. This did not start bleeding; nonetheless, I covered it with a bandage to avoid it deteriorating further.
I did not have severe internal injuries. However, I did have stiffness in a few parts of my body, including the bottom right of my ribs, the back of my neck, my knees, and lower legs.
Initially I felt weak and shaken without concrete injuries; after around 12 hours, I felt more explicit pains. After about 1 day, most of my internal pains were reduced, but I still needed to be careful about craning my neck or rapidly moving some parts of my body.
To speed up my recovery, I took some precautions:
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I slept from around 8:45 to 7:30 the day of the accident. Although sleep wasn't too peaceful because of the pain, the greater duration approximately made up for it.
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I made more use of pillows and did some experimentation to find comfortable sleeping positions.
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I stayed home the next day (September 11) and worked fewer hours than usual. I also took a nap for one hour from 6 PM to 7 PM, kept my surroundings darker than usual (to respect my already-present light-sensitivity) and again slept a little longer than usual.
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By Thursday, September 12, I was feeling well again. However, I still skipped morning exercise on Thursday and Friday. I had anyway marked Friday as a holiday, so I saved myself from commuting on that day as well.