Old Yarn - Bike Crash on Golden Gate Bridge

Introduction

This is the second “old yarn” installment on albertnet (inspired by my pioneering effort “The Cinelli Jumpsuit”). This is the kind of story that would normally be a “From the Archives” item, except I’ve never before written it down.

Bike crash on Golden Gate Bridge

During the late ‘90s—I remember because I was still living in San Francisco—I had a catastrophic ride on one of my favorite bicycles of all time, Bomb Pop. I named this bike after the popsicle that had the same red, white, and blue coloration, one color fading into the next. It was a Guerciotti, the team issue for an old pro team. When I was still in college I’d bought it from one of their guys, who’d never even built it up.

Just a couple weeks before this ill-fated ride, I’d replaced almost all of the components on Bomb Pop with the newest Shimano Dura-Ace, and even put new wheels on it. I had seriously considered just replacing the whole bike because this was the longest I’d ever owned a racing frame, and couldn’t be sure how sound it still was. (Steel rusts, after all, and I lived near the ocean.) So, before mounting all the new parts, I stripped the frame all the way down and had a framebuilder inspect it. He scrutinized it, even took it outside into the sun to see better, and summed up his inspection with the simple statement, “I’d ride it.”

Back then, all my bike rides started with a trip through the old, defunct Presidio army base and then over the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin County. It was almost always windy on the bridge, and a bit tricky because even though they segregated traffic, with pedestrians directed to the walkway on the east side of the bridge and bicycles on the west side (each protected from car traffic by a tall barrier), you tended to encounter confused tourists who either couldn’t read the signs, didn’t notice them, or felt some need to defy them. Meanwhile, it was a bit tricky getting around the bridge stanchions because it was narrow through there and the wind buffeted around and you had to keep an eye out for those rogue pedestrians. On top of that, around the stanchions there were giant steel plates over the concrete which were slick as snot on rainy days or even when there was just a lot of fog (which wasn’t rare).

And, there were the other cyclists to deal with. As described here, I often fell in with this or that random rider to take turns drafting, especially when it was windy. A lot of these riders were as seasoned as I, but then you also had to contend with tourists on rented bikes (wobbling all over the place, usually), and then the aggressive quasi-cyclists who took it as a personal affront when you passed them, and would sometimes put up a fight. I remember on one cold, damp day I passed some dude (non-Lycra, cheap road bike) who subsequently charged past me and stormed off ahead. I thought, oh dear, this guy is gonna try to keep too much speed around the next stanchion, and that steel plate is gonna be wet, and he’s gonna totally stack. Sure enough, when I got to the next stanchion he was on the ground. Steel plate is way harder than pavement and I’ll bet that really hurt. I helped the guy up and got him back on his bike—fortunately, he wasn’t seriously injured—and he seemed really ticked at me, like it was somehow my fault he crashed.

But that was a different day. On the day in question, the beginning of the end of Bomb Pop’s useful life, the road was dry but it was very windy and I was out of the saddle, just past a stanchion, sprinting back up to speed, when suddenly (to quote some Euro pro from a post-race interview), “I was going, and going, and then I was not good.” Out of nowhere, I found myself crashing face-first into the steel plate.

It’s peculiar to crash face-first. A more typical crash would involve sliding out sideways (which is preferable because your head usually doesn’t even touch the ground) or hitting something with the front wheel and flipping over the bars. In this latter crash the entire bike rotates around the front hub, so it’s not really a face-first crash; it usually results in a head-first crash which of course is not good, but there’s always the chance that your tuck-and-roll turns the whole thing into an acrobatic stunt, so you come all the way around like a gymnast and can come through miraculously unscathed. One time, in the UC Santa Barbara community of Isla Vista, I rode my commuter bike down a steep boat ramp at low tide to attempt a gnarly jump off the end, which I executed almost perfectly except that my front wheel landed first and was stopped dead in the deep sand, and I was launched over the bars. This could have been bad—I wasn’t even wearing a helmet, this having been biking home from class, not on a training ride—but I somersaulted in the sand and came up on my feet, arms outstretched in a victory salute, celebrating, I guess, how totally fine I was. To my astonishment, when I looked back (presumably at some pal who was with me), I saw some guy with a camcorder who’d filmed the entire thing. Damn, what I’d give for that footage!

I’ve only crashed face-first twice in my life. The first time was on the Broadway bike path in Boulder, which runs parallel to the road with a nice median in between. Alas, at the spot where I crashed the median was a rock garden rather than the grass featured in other sections, so that’s what my face landed in. I couldn’t figure out why the hell I’d crashed, and my forensic investigation (which began immediately) turned up, before anything else, a bunch of ball bearings. WTF!? Then I noticed that the steerer tube of my fork—this is the tube that extends from the fork crown up to where the top of the headset is, where the handlebar stem is inserted—had snapped.

This is not a known phenomenon in cycling. I mean, it really never happens. In this case it turned out that too little of the stem was inserted into the steerer tube, so there was too much leverage applied to too small an area of metal. Now, before you chide me for getting what I deserved, since the minimum insertion of every stem is clearly marked, I’ll tell you exactly how this happened. I’d bought the stem used from a colleague at the bike shop, and this absolute fuckwit had cut off part of the stem where it goes into the steerer tube (to save weight, the stupid douchebag) and somehow neglected to mention this to me. What’s more, he’d needlessly polished the new end of the stem where he’d cut it, almost as if to hide his handiwork. So he basically set me up to have this crash. (Since you may be wondering: no, his body was never found.)

So, this being only the second time I’d ever crashed face-first, I was just as befuddled as the first time. Right away I noticed that my front wheel was farther away from the rest of the bicycle than it’s ever supposed to get. The second thing I noticed was that my chin was gushing blood like an open water main. (Okay, fine, I exaggerate—which is easy to do when you’re bleeding.) The third thing I noticed was—and this was eerily familiar—ball bearings! WTF?! Again? 

(Wait—stop! I just fact-checked myself. I vividly remember watching little headset bearings rolling across the steel plate, but as the astute reader would be quick to note, the 7700-issue Dura-Ace headset used cartridge bearings. So this particular detail is the embroidery of memory. It makes a better story, but simply isn’t true. I could go revise the previous paragraph but I shall let it stand as a reminder that memory can be flaky. But don’t worry, the main facts of this tale are accurate because frequent oral retelling of the story keeps them alive in memory ... it’s only when I go to flesh out the details “on paper” that I run the risk of fabrication.)

No, the failure wasn’t a used handlebar stem this time. Again, the steerer tube failed, but this time it sheared off right at the fork crown. Probably sweat from riding the stationary trainer had accumulated and caused it to rust.

As I got to my feet and hauled my bifurcated bicycle out of the path of biking traffic, the words “I’d ride it” echoed in my head. So much for the framebuilder’s inspection! Now I faced the problem of how to get home when my bloody bike—literally bloody, as my chin was still dripping—wasn’t even walkable. If I’d brought the tools necessary to disconnect the brake and gear cables I could have carried most of the bike over one shoulder and the rest under my other arm, but as it was this was really awkward, especially clack-clack-clacking along in my cycling shoes. My chin was hemorrhaging the whole way, leaving blood droplets on the ground like a trail of breadcrumbs. Finally I made it to the San Francisco end of the bridge where there was a pay phone. (Cell phones were pretty widespread by this time but I was not an early adopter.) I tried to call my wife but it just rang and rang … she was out for a run.

At this point I was noticed by a group of grade-school aged Asian girls. I couldn’t figure out where they came from—this was in the evening, past the hours for a field trip—and there wasn’t a single adult among them. They looked very freaked out by the blood running off my chin. One of them came forward. She was wearing a very smart outfit, like a private school uniform, adorned incongruously with a fanny pack which she proceeded to root through. She produced a travel pack of Kleenex and pulled some out. Trembling slightly—equal parts fear and concern—she held them out to me. I suspect she spoke no English, or perhaps just didn’t know what to say. I thanked her profusely and began applying pressure to my chin. At that moment I heard a siren. Some fool had called an ambulance!

Last time I’d been taken in an ambulance was after a mountain bike crash in Tilden Park. For $600 I was driven the equivalent of two blocks, to where a helicopter could land. My insurance (through the university) covered only $100 of it. That expense gave me a lifelong antipathy toward ambulances, and I sure didn’t need one now. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely could have used a proper rag to stanch my chin with, instead of the rapidly disintegrating Kleenex, but I didn’t require a stretcher, a neck brace, a sirens-and-flashing-lights trip though a big city, and an outrageous co-pay. So I did the obvious thing: I hid. Fortunately I was obscured from view (behind the pay phone and the pillar it was attached to, if memory serves) and the paramedics never spotted me. I peeked a couple of times and they were just wandering around looking for some guy who’d crashed his bike. For some reason the Asian girls decided I was hiding for good reason and didn’t rat me out. Eventually the ambulance drove off.

I got back on the phone, failed again to reach my wife, and was stumped. Who else did I know who could come get me? I was in that phase of life where I’d moved to a new city after college and spent most of my time working; beyond that, I passed my time cycling and taking walks with my wife, so I didn’t have much of a social group yet. But, there was always the help desk.

The company I worked for offered computer network services to large corporations, with 24x7 tech support, including escalation to network engineers for thorny problems. Thus, there was a pager rotation among us, such that each week somebody was on-call around the clock. So I called the Network Operations Center and asked the tech to page the engineer on-call. The tech asked for the company name. I explained there was no company, I just needed the on-call to come pick me up after a bike accident. The guy was plenty perplexed and finally opened a trouble ticket,  being as vague in the report as possible. Eventually he bridged in the on-call who, after a good laugh, agreed to come fetch me. He arrived before long and drove me home. Surprisingly, my wife still wasn’t back from her run.

I had time to shower, clean up my road rash, and take a seat in the living room with a book and a good thick washcloth to continue the pressure on my chin. The bleeding hadn’t stopped but the pressure helped. When my wife finally arrived, I assumed a pensive pose, hand on chin (obscuring the cloth), while we had a brief conversation. The point of this (as described in this handy accident reporting guide) was to ease her into the news of my accident, while showcasing how okay I was, so she wouldn’t be excessively alarmed. After a couple minutes I casually remarked, “I took a bit of a spill on my ride today. I should probably head to the ER and get looked at.” Only then did I let her see my chin, and she agreed we should head over right away.

This being San Francisco, parking would have been tricky at the hospital. Our car was parked at least five or ten minutes from our apartment, and as the World’s Cheapest Man I refused, especially in those days, to ever pay for a parking garage. Plus, it was only a 20-minute walk to the Saint Francis hospital. It was surprisingly non-crowded and they had me stitched up in no time. Two nurses got in an argument over whether I should cover the wound or leave it open to the air. The doctor didn’t take sides, but did ask me if I had a general practitioner. This got me a glare from my wife—sore subject—and I confessed I did not. “Good,” the ER doc said. “Stay away from hospitals … they’re full of sick people.” My wife and I walked home and got on with our evening.

(In case you’re wondering, I was able to get Bomb Pop back on the road pretty quickly using an ugly green replacement fork, just barely visible in the photo above, which  I got from a friend. This was a stopgap, of course, now that I couldn’t trust the rest of the frame anymore. My next frameset was Full  Slab, which you can read about here.)

My little stunt with calling the NOC and paging the on-call earned me some notoriety at work in the days following the accident. I already had a reputation as a thrill-seeker after some of us got in trouble for goofing off during a snowmobile ride at a company offsite (turns out if you over-steer and goose the throttle you can do a sweet fishtail, sending up a dramatic spray of snow, but that the rental people frown on this sort of thing), and for a high-speed jet-ski crash at another work offsite. Several colleagues gave the stitches in my chin a good, close look. I got to tell the story of the concerned but frightened Asian tourist girls and the proffered Kleenex. On Friday afternoon our manager held his weekly team meeting, and as it wound down, he said, “Okay, one more thing. Who’s taking the on-call this weekend? Because Dana’s riding!”

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How To Report Your Bicycle Accident

Introduction

This post describes best practices for reporting your bicycle crash to your family. (This is not an emergency response protocol; that’s another matter entirely.)

Before we begin

In no way do I seek to mock, trivialize, or brush off the potential seriousness of bicycle accidents. Of course they can be pretty bad, as I know from painful experience. This guide concerns those crashes (the majority) where serious injury does not result.

(Levity aside, don’t mess around with head impacts. If your helmet touches the ground, somebody else needs to evaluate you, period. I have seen a concussed cyclist in complete denial, which isn’t a surprise given the fuzziness that can accompany head injury.)

One more thing. This post will make it seem like I crash my bike a lot. I don’t. I’ve been at this sport for almost 40 years, and have logged over 200,000 cycling miles, including more than 200 races. Of course I’ve had my share of accidents but in the words of the venerable Marshall Mathers, I’m “still alive and bitching.”

Okay, all that being out of the way, let’s continue.

Do you really need medical intervention?

First of all, if the medical establishment gets involved in your crash, you will have a lot harder time “controlling the narrative” (to quote a legendary cyclist/doper). So the issue of medical attention becomes something to manage as part of your notification protocol.

Sometimes a bike crash is frightening to an onlooker who naturally fears the worst, and summons more help than is necessary. I wiped out in a criterium back in 1983 and got some nasty road rash, but nothing more. Alas, it was raining, I was soaked, my body fat was minimal, and post-crash I was lying on a wet lawn, so I was shivering. Somebody took this for me going into shock. The race medic flew into action, cutting up my cycling shorts with those razor-like shears they carry. My johnson dangled out, and—looking up at all these spectators, two of my brothers included—I reached down and discreetly covered up. (My brothers teased me about this for years. Had I not made that adjustment, of course, I’d have been teased for being an exhibitionist.) I was carted away in an ambulance, which caused quite a sensation. At the awards banquet that evening (this having been the final day of a stage race), everyone seemed surprised to see me back on my feet already. The race director said, “I thought you’d broken your hip!”

Other than the johnson part, I confess I wasn’t much bothered by all the attention. That’s because I was only 14 and didn’t understand the emotional duress this episode caused my mom. (When my brother crashed in a race later that season and broke his wrist, she resolved never to attend a bike race again—and she never did.) My dad, of course, seemed to take my crash in stride. He was the one who accompanied me to the hospital, which I didn’t wonder at back then, but now realize is probably because my mom was too freaked to take part. My dad had to fill out this form explaining how the crash happened, and to the question, “List any object the bicyclist came into contact with,” he drolly wrote, “Pavement.”

Of course my brothers gave me no end of flack about the outrageous drama queen behavior I had employed just so I could ride in the ambulance. They chided me for the unnecessary financial burden I had inflicted upon the family just to gratify my narcissistic thirst for attention. They way they went on, you’d think I had Munchausen Syndrome. But they did have a point: if it’s possible, you should decide for yourself whether medical intervention is truly necessary. Any one of my brothers would have loved to clean out that road rash with a toothbrush at home, which would have been only slightly less efficient than the nylon brush used in the ER. One rule of thumb: without a head impact, and in the absence of any obvious sign that you need an X-ray, maybe you should just limp on home.

How to get home

Even if you do need medical attention, this does not always warrant an ambulance. Back in the late ’90s, I had a fairly dramatic crash on the Golden Gate Bridge. I was able to get a ride home from a work colleague (details are here), which was a lot better than having to call my wife. If you can possibly manage it, avoid phoning your spouse/other to ask for a ride home. Engaging him or her causes several problems. First, this non-trivial inconvenience doesn’t put you on the best footing for the other inconveniences your crash may cause later (e.g., extra laundry, excessive groaning or whining). Also, if your spouse/other comes to get you, he or she will have the entire drive to fear the worst, even if you’ve assured him or her that everything is fine. (As I’ll get to, that assurance is not always 100% accurate.) And, if your spouse/other has to leave work to fetch you, his or her colleagues will wonder and worry. It’s all so inefficient! By contrast, the colleague who picked me up got a good laugh out of it because my well-being had no bearing on his.

The idea here is to forestall your spouse/other’s knowledge of your crash as long as possible, so that she can see for herself that you’re fine before even knowing you crashed. After the Golden Gate Bridge incident, I needed stitches, but I waited for my wife to get home so we could go to the ER (on foot) together. I hid the gauze on my (seriously bleeding) chin by assuming a pensive pose, like I was stroking a goatee, while we had a 5-minute conversation. Only after this did I say, as if suddenly remembering, “Oh, hey—I took a little spill on my bike this evening and need to get a few stitches. You wanna come with me to the ER?”

After another crash, when my bike suffered a broken crankarm, I got a ride in a Samaritan’s pickup truck to the nearest train station. While riding home one-footed from the station near my house, I stopped at a bakery for pastries, so that by the time my wife realized I’d crashed, she’d already know I was well enough to run a gratuitous errand. In fact, I wasn’t totally fine—I’d cracked some ribs, though I didn’t learn this until later. Though it was a pretty high-speed crash, it left very few marks on me.

In another case, I crashed on a descent near Oakland and hitched a ride home in a a friendly motorist’s van, my bike being again unrideable. I came into the house through the garage, announced to my wife that I was home, and then on the way to the bathroom whispered to my young daughter, “Bring me the first-aid kit from the kitchen cabinet.” I managed not to howl in the shower while scrubbing out my road rash, but it was all for naught because my daughter, halfway down the stairs, yelled out, “Hey Dad, why do you need the first-aid kit?” I should have explained the tactic better.

In general I don’t mind hitching a ride with a motorist, as their willingness to help is generally a good indicator of trustworthiness. That said, if somebody hits you with his or her car and then offers you a ride, you might think twice. After all, if he or she could be drunk, stoned, crazy, or some combination of these.

Now, the rules are a bit different if you’re not yet an adult. The best case here is that you have a friend with a car who can drive you to the hospital and/or home. In 1986 I crashed in a criterium in Denver, and the race medic directed me to the nearest ER for a few chin stitches. (Actually, since I wasn’t yet 18, he recommended the local children’s hospital, which had a much shorter wait. Good call, that!) My friend Bill drove me in his Volvo wagon. Unfortunately, he was in such a hurry to get going, he started to drive before I was all the way in the car, and managed to run over my foot. D’oh!

If you’re not yet an adult and don’t have a friend with a car, your parents are pretty much the only option (unless you have a local aunt or uncle). In this case you’re bound to scare the crap out of your parent(s) if you don’t play it just right. So do not have somebody else call if you can possibly avoid it; that implies that you’re out cold or otherwise can’t talk. Make the call yourself but do not say, “Oh my God! I’ve  just been in a terrible bike wreck!” (I have heard this said, by a young rider who was plenty frightened but wasn’t actually injured.) If you’re conscious and able to talk, chances are you can manage some composure for the duration of a phone call. An ideal explanation, given in as calm a voice as possible, would be, “Hi [Mom/Dad]. How’s it going? [Wait for answer.] Cool. Well, hey, um, I’ve got a bit of a problem with my bike. Could you possibly give me a ride home? [Wait for inevitable questions.] Well, yeah, I took a bit of a spill on it. I’m totally fine … it’s just that my [wheel/whatever] is all out of whack. [Wait for more questions.] Oh, yeah, I’m perfectly fine. Maybe a bit of road rash. Nothing to worry about.”

My own daughter called me last Sunday and said, “Hi Dad. Is there any way you can come get me? I had a crash on the bike path and I can’t get my handlebars straightened out.” On the way to fetching her I was only mildly worried. (Her bars, I’d like to point out, were perfectly straight, at least by the time I got there.) I give my daughter a B+ for this performance. She’d have earned an A, except there was a bit of a quaver to her voice. (Don’t worry, she’s fine.)

If you do need an ambulance…

The hardest call you’d ever have to make would be, of course, the notification that you’re about to be hauled off in an ambulance and need your spouse/other to meet you at the hospital. All I can recommend here is to accentuate the positive. Try to sound as chipper as possible, and lead off with whatever good news you can. For example: “I’m pretty sure nothing is broken but somebody called an ambulance, so I guess I’ll go get checked out.” If something is broken, you might say something like, “I’ve taken a spill on my bike but you don’t need to worry—my head is totally fine. It looks like I might have a fracture of some kind, though, so they’re taking me in an ambulance for some X-rays.” Do whatever you can to insinuate that the medical industrial complex is overreacting (“as usual”). Of course this will still be alarming but it’s a fair bit better than, “Oh my God! I’ve just been in a terrible bike wreck!”

Reporting your kid’s accident

Reporting your kid’s accident to your spouse/other is, needless to say, especially delicate, particularly if (like me) you’re the reason your kid rides bikes so much. If you take your kid to a bike race, ensure in advance that the folks in the medical tent have your cell phone number on file as primary, not your spouse/other’s. This isn’t just more practical, but it avoids undue stress in the case of an accident. It’s a lot easier not to worry when you’re onsite and can evaluate your kid for yourself.

After my daughter’s recent bike path crash, I wasn’t sure what to say to my wife, and in the end I said nothing. My daughter and I just waited until my wife noticed the Tegaderm dressings on her daughter’s forearms. By this point, we’d all been home together for at least half an hour so our daughter was obviously fine. “What happened?” my wife asked. “Oh, I crashed on the Ohlone Greenway,” our daughter shrugged. “That’s too bad,” replied her mom.

That’s about your best case scenario right there … other than not crashing at all, of course.

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The Femur Report - Part I

NOTE: This post is rated R for mild strong language and disturbing images.

Introduction

I had a bad bike wreck on Nov 27. Writing about its aftermath isn’t the most cheerful way I could spend my time, and I wouldn’t expect reading about it to be uplifting. Still, it’s been an extraordinary experience and it would seem a shame not to record it.

Note that though I’ve reported this episode as faithfully as I can, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of every detail. Especially where vast pain is involved, memory gets distorted. But I haven’t deliberately fictionalized anything and in fact have tried to be as plain and simple as possible in the telling.

I’m not going to get into how the wreck happened. That’s a whole other story that makes me angry to think about. So I’ll start with when I hit the ground.

The ground

I’m on the ground. A second earlier I was upright, on my bike, enjoying a mellow, unrushed descent at the end of my ride. I’m astonished at how quickly I was dropped to the ground, like a duck shot right out of the sky. I’ve been cycling competitively for thirty years and this is not how a crash usually unfolds. I’ve written at length at how in a crash situation time seems to slow down and I can easily perceive what is happening and what action to take. Not so today. BAM—like that, I was down. I heard my helmet sliding on the ground but only for a second. I didn’t slide much, but rather ground to a stop.

Every experienced cyclist knows that after you crash the first order of business is getting out of the road. This isn’t a sports field where you have a moment for self pity or mustering your resolve—it’s a road and you could get run over. So you scramble to get up as fast as you can. In the past I’ve started this scramble even before I stopped sliding along the road. But today I cannot begin to get up. Mainly this is because I cannot stop screaming, and the screaming is taking all my energy, all my will. I am screaming louder than I thought possible.

I’m screaming in pain, which is remarkable. Crashing on a bicycle doesn’t usually involve that much pain, at least not up front. Initially our bodies give us a surge of adrenaline and endorphins and the pain is masked almost completely. We can snatch up our bikes, run off the side of the road, check things over, and (if it’s a race) can often straighten out our handlebars, climb back on, and start chasing back to the group. The pain doesn’t arrive until later, when you’re cleaning out your road rash. But today? This was at least twice as much pain as I’d ever felt before in my life.

I can see my bike in the road. The impact has knocked the chain off the front chainwheels, which vexes me inordinately. The water bottle has been knocked out of its cage. Closer to me, I see blood dripping on the ground but I’m not sure what part of me it’s coming from. And the ground, this road—it’s a medieval surface of smooth pebbles imbedded in asphalt. I can start to see why such a relatively low-speed crash has hurt so badly—it’s an incredibly hard surface (pebbles being far harder than asphalt) and doesn’t allow you to slide. Whoever chose this surface material should be tried for a war crime.

Help

With astonishing quickness several people swarm around me. They’re local residents who have heard my screams. “I’ve got to get out of the road,” I tell one. He is crouching next to me. “Don’t worry, we’re stopping traffic,” he said. For a moment I think of asking him to get the Advil out of my toolkit but of course I see the absurdity. “I’m in so much pain,” I tell him, and scream some more. I’ve found what for some reason seems the least painful position: my right leg is straight forward—its hip is the center of the pain—and my left leg is bent double so I’m in a half-squat, leaning forward, supporting as much weight as possible on my left hand. My left arm shakes with the effort. “Who has a signal?” someone asks. “I do, I’m calling,” someone answers. I tell them, “I don’t think I need an ambulance,” but immediately I realize this is wishful thinking. “Actually I do.”

A guy on my left says, “I’m a doctor. You’ve got a broken femur. We called an ambulance.” There’s a cyclist on the scene and he has taken my bike out of the road and leaned it up against something. I can see he’s put the chain back on and I take strange comfort from this. Someone asks me for my home phone number and in a moment I’m talking to my wife. This is the worst call to have to make. I give her the news—my head is fine, but something is broken—and hope that I sound merely miserable, not scared.

A fire truck arrives from a station that is very close by. I beg for pain meds. They work quickly but it could never be quick enough. I get 5 mg of morphine intravenously but it doesn’t do anything. They’re cutting off my clothing. The EMT gets to my right shoe and I ask him to let me undo the rotary buckles and take it off, sparing its life.

Here a massive wave of gratitude washes over me. This is the moment when I go from being in charge of my situation—which is to say, being helpless—to when I turn my situation over to those with special training who know exactly what to do. Imagine if I were on a battlefield, or a remote road alone, or on a mountain where my survival meant crawling for miles through my pain and injury. Then I’d really be screwed. I am relieved to be passively placed in good hands, where all I have to do is answer questions.

They get my helmet off. Now the medics are preparing a long scary-looking metal apparatus next to my right leg. The man who earlier identified himself as a doctor tells me, “They’re going to have to put you in traction. This will pull your right leg straight. You’ll have to lie back. It’s going to hurt like hell.” It does. I can’t stop screaming. It seems like nothing they could possibly do to my leg could hurt more than this. The traction device is basically an iron maiden for the leg. I get 5 mg more morphine and that’s all they’re allowed to give me. It’s still not enough, not even close. An ambulance has arrived somewhere along the line and I’m scooped onto a stretcher and into the back of it (more screaming). I’m begging for more pain relief.

(I’m going to pause my story for a moment now to make an observation: I can now speak from experience about the stupidity of torture. To be freed from this pain, I’d have told anybody anything. The fact that I have no secrets simply means that I’d contrive something, anything I thought would satisfy a questioner. If the medics had asked, “Are you part of The Institute?” I’d have said yes. If they’d asked if I knew who masterminded Operation X, I’d have said yes. I’d have begged for a list of suspected operatives and randomly circled names, if it meant being freed from this pain. That is how desperate pain can make you.)

At some point I am given some other drug, perhaps to treat anxiety, and I start to suffer less. But every bump in the road—and there seem to be endless bumps—makes me cry out. The ambulance’s suspension seems to be shot.

Hospital

We arrive at the hospital. I am whisked from place to place, hallways and curtains, and end up in the X-ray department. It’s all huge and industrial and Orwellian and when somebody says, “We have to move you onto the X-ray table” there’s an unmistakable note of apology in his voice. Four of them lift up the whole sheet and move me. It is impossible to set somebody down lightly when he has a broken femur and the table is hard as glass. More bloodcurdling screams. I have a flashback to 1984, when I was fifteen, in a hospital in Wyoming after a car wreck with my mom and two of my brothers, and I suddenly heard my brother screaming his head off from all the way down the hall. The shock of recognition—that’s my brother screaming!—was not so different from the shock I feel now: that’s me screaming!

The X-ray table is my worst enemy for what seems an endless period of one X-ray after another, many with my body arranged in torturous positions. They know my femur is broken but are trying to figure out if my pelvis is broken. Finally another excruciating transition to the gurney, and I’m taken back to a curtained-off row.

They get some more pain meds in me and I’m starting to get some real relief. Presently my wife arrives. Of course I’m glad to see her but also full of remorse at putting her through this. If she were some fiery hot-blooded type who slapped me across the face first thing, I’d probably have felt better. Of course it’s preferable that she’s stable, calm, and strong. She knows she doesn’t have the luxury of getting upset and making this her problem—it’s mine and she’s my support. A team of doctors arrive. “We’re going to drill a hole through your tibia and insert a long screw, so we can get a good purchase on your leg for traction,” one of them explains. I love the idea—if it means getting this barbaric clamp off my leg. “You’ll take the old traction thing off as soon as that’s done, right?” I ask. They assure me they will—soothingly, as if we’re in agreement that the old traction device is the center of all my pain.

The drill

My wife asks why this operation wouldn’t be done in an operating room. “Oh, we don’t need a room for it,” they assure her. “It’s not like a big surgery or anything, it’s just a procedure. And we have to do it right now.” And they’re not joking, there’s no leaving and coming back, no apparent bureaucracy, they’re already preparing. They put on these Plexiglas face shields like a SWAT team would wear. Now, maybe it’s just the pain meds, but suddenly I’m struck by how improbably good-looking they all are. It looks like the cast of an TV show, an eye-candy hospital drama that isn’t even trying to be realistic.

They describe the local anesthesia they’ll be using: Novocain and something else. I warn them that I historically metabolize Novocain very quickly, so it usually starts to wear off by the time the doctor thinks it should be kicking in. The doctors offer a blandly reassuring response. They’re putting the bit into the drill. I swear the bit must be a foot long. I crane to see what kind of drill it is. I’m hoping for Mikita or Skil. If it’s Black and Decker, I’m out of here. It turns out to be Craftsman, which is just barely satisfactory. I relate to them a story from my dad about a fleck of chrome from a Craftsman tool that befouled a photocell in a satellite and sent it way off-course. (At that time I may have thought I was only thinking about this anecdote, but Erin assures me I actually told it.) Now they’re ready to start.

“Erin, you may want to make yourself scarce for this,” I tell my wife, but she’s sticking around. I suppose she feels a duty to stand by me, but it also wouldn’t surprise me if she had feelings similar to my own: as horrible as this is, it’s fascinating. How often do you get a chance to watch something like this?

A resident will be doing the drilling. She lines up the drill. Her eye and her hands are as steady as a pool shark’s as he lines up a shot. She looks to be about twenty years old. The others are giving her advice and encouragement. The bit goes in. My head flops back on the gurney and I scream. Of course the pain is bloody murder but with it comes a strange feeling of vindication. Sure, this hurts like hell, but of course it hurts like hell—it should hurt like hell, I’m having a drill go through my leg! The pain in the bone is only part of it, though—the vibration along my whole leg is just as bad. As for the local anesthetic, it’s not quite up to snuff: I can feel the drill well enough to recognize when its direction changes and it’s being drawn back out of my leg. I get a huge sense of relief from this, knowing the procedure is almost over.

Then the drill is out and the resident is getting a pat on the back. I ask her, “Is this the first time you’ve done this?” She replies, “No, it’s my second. The first one was a disaster. Halfway in the drill died, and everybody had to run around looking for another drill before we could get the bit out!” Now I’m even more impressed with the calm she had beforehand. You know the saying: “Learn one, do one, teach one.”

Relief

To the screw in my tibia they attach, on either side, cables that run through little pulleys on an apparatus attached to the foot of the gurney. From these cables they hang water-filled plastic weights. With the cables pulling the tibia screw forward and thus pulling my leg straight, they no longer need the original traction device, and finally remove it. What a relief. Somebody notices that one of the weights is leaking and sends for a replacement.

Now they set about giving me a nerve block. This is kind of like the epidural that pregnant women get. I don’t know the exact science but it involves injection of drugs right into or near to nerves. To pinpoint where to administer this, they use ultrasound. One watches the monitor while the other administers the drug. “Okay, you’re right in position, drop some right there. Good. Go a little deeper here. Drop some more.” The guy has the depths of my leg mapped like some high-tech mining operation. “Okay, a little deeper, little more, okay—right there—drop the rest.” The sense of competence of this team thrills me, and then when the nerve block takes effect, the pain in my leg quiets down some more.

(Note: having read this, Erin wonders about the sequence of tibia screw vs. nerve block. She doesn’t remember which came first, but thinks it more logical that they’d have started with the nerve block. I distinctly remember the screw being first based on the pain, and based on my understanding that the screw was essential whereas the nerve block was just a nice-to-have. But as I said earlier, memory can be distorted.)

They move me to a hospital room and say “No food until after surgery tomorrow.” Not a problem. For once in my life I have no appetite.

To be continued...

That’s about all I care to write for now. If you feel like this was something worth reading, stay tuned because of course there’s more to tell.

Other chapters

2014 update:  it occurred to me to add links to all the chapters of this tale now that they're available.  Here you go:

The Femur Report - Part II (posted Dec 19, 2011)

The Femur Report - Part III (posted Dec 28, 2011)

Physical Therapy (posted March 11, 2012)

Bike vs. Car - How I Broke My Femur (posted Nov 27, 2013)