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ECSTASY TO CATASTROPHE
It is a classic, great day in the morning. Mist rises in the hollows, rabbits sit beside the road like old hobos, Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains beckon.
I ride my 800cc Kawasaki up Route 66, a smooth, winding snake of a road like those that twist through northern Thailand. The sun bakes off the fog, the bike purrs, my heart soars. Life is perfect.
I remember 3 moments…
1. A car is speeding toward me in my lane.
2. IMPACT. Black out. Game over.
3. Voices from far, far away get real, real close as I slowly gain consciousness. “Don’t move his head!” “They’ve gone after her.” “Was anyone else on your bike?” “Lay still. Where are you hurt?”
Moment One. It’s a postcard, no motion, just a snapshot, a close up of the front end of a white car, right in front of me. I glimpse a sliver of roadway between the car and the road shoulder. No time to get there, no time to swerve, no time to finish the thought!
Moment Two. A split second of sound and sensation. Car 75 km per hour plus bike 75 km per hour = 150 km per hour IMPACT. I’m told I was thrown 30 meters. (I dream of telling the joke: “What did the fish say when it hit the wall? Dam.”)
Moment Three. Imagine waking up on the couch to find yourself watching a black and white movie in a dark room
on an old TV with lousy reception. Slowly you realise you’re in the movie, lying on the ground. No, it’s not a movie, this is your life, you can start screaming now! The good news: I’m listening to what’s happening around me and not watching my entire life flash in front of my eyes. The bad news: all the parts of me that aren’t in shock are in pain. I wish it were a dream, I could go back to sleep on that couch and wake up yesterday.
I focus on breathing as deep as my bruised ribs will allow and meditate on the 99.999% of my being that is spirit instead of the 0.001% that’s human, solid and/or fractured. Maybe my time is up, my number’s been called, I have a meeting with my maker that didn’t make my appointment book? Maybe I only have a few more moments? If so, I’ll go gently, a gentle man, the way I feel I’ve lived my life.
I have no concept of time
Paramedics cut off my clothes, strap me onto a board,
secure my head, take off for Baptist Hospital. (Maybe I’ll be born again with several new body parts?) Soon I’m in a TV show shot from the patient’s angle - bright lights, tops of doorways, elevators and hallways, room ceilings, curtains opening and shutting, bodiless voices.
An endless procession of doctors and nurses begins. They’re nameless; I’m nameless. I hear the facts and they’re grim:
“Fifty-two year old male on motorcycle in head-on collision with car at highway speeds, right foot pain, abdomen/pelvis pain, neck pain.” They assume there’s a lot more right under the skin that’s bent, folded, spindled and mutilated. Three teams of doctors are enlisted: Neurological Surgery, Orthopedic Surgery and Trauma. They’re all Dr.Nameless and they have no heads. They speak from somewhere I can’t see, they all sound the same and they all talk to my feet. I say, maybe I dream I say, maybe I just dream: “Hey! Hello, down there? I have eyes and ears, located on my head, which is up here. Did you put me in the bed upside down? Do you all have foot fetishes?”
For the next million moments, I’m rolled around the hospital and get to ride on many million dollar machines, like the fair but instead of 4 tickets per ride, these cost 4 digits. Their cheerful operators are all Nurse Nameless. They’re at work and I’m their work. At every station, they scoop me off my hard plastic platform and drag me onto their harder, higher, plastic platform.
“Excuse me, question!!”
“With all the money spent on research, can’t you find a way to keep the patient on one platform, especially when said patient is in several pieces held together loosely with skin?”
My neck is immobilized. My foot is set so I can’t move it until they can operate. First they must deal with an injured artery in my neck requiring blood thinners, more visits to machines and another page of charges on my hospital bill. They take X-rays of my X-rays, MRIs, EKGs, FBIs, several RSVPs and everyone that comes near the bed wants some of my blood.
Trooper Robles stops by, serious but gleeful. He proudly announces that they have arrested a drunken woman, charged her with hit-and-run, reckless driving, driving while intoxicated and having no insurance. She swerved into my lane, hit me head on, got out of her car, looked at me, got back in her car and drove off.
One car had been following her because she was weaving erratically and hit a few mailboxes before taking me out. They kept up the chase, trapped her in a driveway, took her keys and called the police.
There in North Carolina a driver is legally drunk with a blood count of 0.08. Hers was 0.27, over 3 times the limit! When pink elephants get drunk, they see her. I was wearing a bright yellow and black padded riding jacket. After IMPACT,
she probably wanted to see what hit her. Looking at me, she thought, “That’s the biggest bumble bee I have ever seen.
Must be a killer bee from South America. Gotta tell my honey about this!”
MMM, MMM, Good…Vitamin M!
IMPACT was late Saturday afternoon. By 3.00am when everyone finally gets everything they want from me, I’m am introduced to morphine, Vitamin M, my best friend for the next few days! Every 2 hours I can ask for Vitamin M and it will drip into my veins, washing the pain away. I think of soldiers lying on the field, wounded far more than I, with no Vitamin M. I feel lucky.
They deposit me in the Acute Care ward with 4 other moaning, groaning patients in various states of semi-consciousness. One young lad tied to his bed thinks he’s in “the cave” and tries to get the nurse into bed with him when she gives him a sponge bath. Another rants, raves and shouts obscenities all night long: god.... (not “God-blessed”) f…… (not “friendly”) @$#*$% doctors are all f…… #%*@$ (not nice at all) etcetera, over and over, ad infinitum. (That’s not how I was taught to speak to people trying to save my life. I gently chant: “Lovely doctors and nurses of happiness and joy, who give me Vitamin M, God bless you and keep you safe and very close to my side, can I have some Vitamin M now?”) The good news: It’s not Intensive Care. The bad news: It’s a baby step away from Intensive Care.
Sunday I revisit several of the machines so Dr. Nameless can see if my bones miraculously healed overnight. All of my doctors stop by to speak with my feet again and a bevy of nurses fight over my last few drops of blood. I learn various techniques, or lack of them, as they’re inflicted on me by this herd of blood letters getters. Two or 3 have mastered the “rifle” technique requiring concentration, careful scrutiny of the arterial landscape, one clean shot right on target, then quick, skillful removal of the red bounty. Most favour the “shotgun” technique: blast away, check which hole is bleeding the most, drill a little deeper in that area, afterwards cover the wound with wide, industrial tape guaranteed to extract entire hair follicles when removed.
Dr. Nameless determines I’ll be ready for foot surgery on Monday. Do not eat or drink anything after midnight on Sunday. Fortunately it is not difficult to give up hospital food. Considering the damage done to the digestive zip code of my body, intestinal rest will be a pleasure.
Jell-O is an entire food group in hospital
The cooks have learned to levitate any substance within
Jell-O: whole pineapples, beef cutlets, living octopus. Though I mention many times that I don’t eat meat and wish to speak with a dietician, meat arrives and dieticians do not. Vegetables are cooked for 3 weeks or until they’re unrecognizable, whichever comes first. After each culinary catastrophe, a nurse asks what percentage of the meal I ate. I never score very high in this area, which visibly upsets these Female Food Police. This is the South, where most people are above average on the weight chart, in fact, some folks are so big, they use their garden satellite dishes as lawn furniture.
One of the nurses weighs more than my entire family. The larger ones have a hard time getting around my room and accidentally bump into my fractured foot because they don’t quite realise how far they extend in all directions. A few need electronic curb feelers with alarms to warn them of obstacles beyond their vision. I believe that no hospital food ever makes it back to the kitchen. All leftovers only make it back to the nurses.
Footloose, but not fancy or free.
A shot of “local” anesthesia keeps my leg numbed
locally, but shoots my mind on a psychedelic journey to another universe. Maybe it was “loco” anesthesia. I don’t even want to know what it was. I would probably take it everyday!
I wake and expect to see my foot in a cast. Wrong. No cast. The foot is naked, yellow, swollen. It has a green knob sticking out of the top and 2 silver pins connected with a black bar, nuts and bolts protruding out of the side. “Frankenfoot,” it is guaranteed to scare young children in public.
When Dr. Ortho visits me, I ask how the foot was, is and will be. He lets out a small, smileless laugh and says my so-and-so bone was “powder.” I don’t mind the words “foot powder” used together, but I don’t like to hear “bone” and “powder” used near each other. Another doctor comes in and casually mentions my “broken neck.” Until then I only had “inoperable cracked and fractured second and third neck vertebrae” which sounded much better than a “broken neck.”
Okay, let’s take inventory. Powdered foot, broken neck, cracked skull, concussion, sliced artery to the brain, inoper able fractured pelvis, several bruised ribs, sprained right hand, extensive soft-tissue damage to leg/groin area. That’s the bad news.
The good news: I’m alive, my arms, hands and back are intact, I have a face, skin and 13 or 14 blood cells the nurses haven’t found. Yet.
Part 2 next month: lessons to be learned - in Thailand too!
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