I woke up on Friday, January 8 at 8 am, which it just so happens is the time I’m supposed to arrive at work. But Fridays are usually laid back at the office, so I wasn’t too concerned. I did fire off an email to my boss telling him I’d be late, before jumping on my bike for the approximate seven minute ride to work. There had been a light dusting of snow, but once I hit 18 Street everything was clear.
Weaving in and out of lanes, rushing through red lights and narrowly avoiding potholes, I hurtled toward the office in record time. I was the king of the road, leaving other bikers in my dust and pedestrians puzzled as I made the final right turn into the alley behind my building. I had a brief scare when a garbage truck nearly backed into me, but like most bike commuters I shrugged it off with an air of invincibility.
Finally, I started my descent into the lower level parking garage, where I had locked my bike every day for the past year. On the 45-degree ramp, I could see the salt crystals the parking attendant had laboriously sprinkled the night before. “Cold out there?” I’d asked him as I’d left work yesterday. “Yes, it’s supposed to snow tonight. Be safe!” he’d replied ominously.
Nearing the bottom of the ramp, I started to pick up speed and could hear the salt grinding beneath my wheels. Suddenly the grinding stopped, the bike slipped from under me, and I hit the ground face first.
At this point, I should note that although I was wearing head protection, a standard bike helmet doesn’t do much for the face. Perhaps a hockey mask or motorcycle helmet could have provided the necessary prophylaxis, but I have yet to see any cyclist go to such lengths.
I didn’t lose consciousness, but when I opened my eyes I knew there had been some serious damage. I couldn’t feel much pain, but I could see blood on the concrete and had enough sense to realize that I had lost or damaged a tooth. My vision was flickering in and out of black. Without thinking, I dragged my body and bike out of the thoroughfare—leaving a trail of blood on the ground—and propped myself up against a wall. Then I called my boss, who was working from home that morning, and told him to send help from the office. Soon, two of my coworkers arrived and hailed a taxi to take me to the emergency room. Later, one of them said the floor of the parking garage had looked more like a “crime scene” than the site of an accident.
So, you might say, I made it out of the frying pan and into the fire, the latter being the U.S. health care system. Accompanied by one of my coworkers, I arrived at the George Washington University hospital, and made it surprisingly quickly through the waiting room and triage. Finally, I was ushered to the hospital floor and into a small curtained-off area, where I was greeted by a pretty female physician’s assistant. So far so good.
She asked me what had happened and I gave her the short version, telling her I hadn’t blacked out but felt a little woozy and that my arm was either broken or sprained. “Do you know where you are?’ she asked. “Yes,” I replied, hoping to convince her of my lucidity. “Well, where?”
Next they had to X-ray my wrist. An assistant came and wheeled me to radiology like a shopping cart, with my legs sticking off the end of the gurney. He deposited me in a waiting area in the middle of the hall, next to two or three other patients in transit. It was then that the full hospitalness of it all hit me—the smell of sickness and sterility mingling in the air; the other patients, worse off than me, trying desperately to get someone’s attention; doctors, nurses and other employees wandering the halls, always with somewhere to go that wasn’t here.
After the X-ray came the next stop on my bizarre journey: the suture room. Here the pretty PA handed over the reins to a clueless fourth-year medical student, who claimed he had experience sewing people up but was out of practice. “Well, the good news is that your chin laceration appears to be superficial,” he said. “Good, because I’m a very superficial person,” I replied, and we all laughed. But I wasn’t laughing 10 minutes later, when the PA came to over to examine the five stitches he had put in me. “These aren’t good,” she said. “You need to take a bigger bite, like you did on the first one.” I was completely conscious, although they had numbed my chin and put one of those green sterile cloths over me, with a circular cutout over my wound. “Take all of them out except for the first one, and then I’ll show you what I mean,” the PA said.
I was too timid to protest, so he did exactly that. By the time they removed the bad stitches and were finishing up the new ones, I had almost completely regained sensation in the affected area. “Just one more!” the medical student said, as I writhed with every prick of the needle.
They finished with the stitches, and decided now would be a good time to tell me I had fractured my radius. They fixed me up in a splint, and a nurse came around with some Percocet, since the shock had worn off and I was now beginning to feel a modest amount of pain in my right wrist. When I complained that I was also feeling some pain in my left arm, they ordered a second X-ray, which took another 20 minutes and came back negative.
As far as my chipped tooth, which was becoming highly sensitive and painful, they offered little advice, like it wasn’t even part of my body. As the nurse went over the discharge with me, I said, “I guess I’ll have to go see the dentist about this,” barely eliciting a response.
Then, I was back on the street, flagging down a taxi to take me home. All in all, I was in pretty good shape, but still needed help around the house, especially with my arm immobilized in a sling. Luckily, my girlfriend flew in for the weekend to take care of me, which turned out to be the best thing to come out of the entire episode.
Now, a week later, I’m making a fast recovery. My tooth is repaired, my stitches removed, and finally, after a week of trying to find an orthopedist and being rejected by GW hospital, I got a nice, blue cast to match the color of my eyes.
I only have to wait six weeks for it to heal; hopefully, it won’t take that long to come up with a new idea for a blog.
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