I have no concept of time. Paramedics arrive, cut off my clothes, strap me onto a plastic board, secure my head, take off for Baptist Hospital. (Maybe I’ll be born again, with several new body parts.) Soon I’m in an episode of ER shot from the patient angle--bright lights, more bright lights, tops of doorways, elevator, hallway and room ceilings, curtains opening and shutting, bodiless voices.

An endless procession of doctors and nurses begins. They’re nameless, I’m nameless. I hear them repeat the facts and the facts are grim: “52-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 try out all the fancy machines, kind of like rides at the fair but instead of four tickets per ride, these cost four digits. Their cheerful operators are all Nurse Nameless. They’re at work and I’m their work. For every machine, they lift me off my hard plastic platform and drag me onto their harder, higher, plastic platform. “Question, excuse me, question!! With all the money spent on research, can’t they 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 operate in a couple of days. First they have to deal with an injured artery in my neck that requires 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, JFKs, several RSVPs and everyone that comes near the bed wants some of my blood. Sometime during the night one of the voices at the bottom of the bed rolls me over and sticks his finger up the road to my prostate. Maybe a male nurse or the resident Catholic priest making his nightly rounds.

Trooper Robles stops by, serious but gleeful. He proudly announces that they have arrested a drunken 44-year-old woman named Julie Tilley, charged her with hit-and-run, reckless driving, driving while intoxicated, and having no auto insurance. She swerved into my lane, hit me head on, got out of her car, looked at me, got back in her car and took off. One car had been following her because she was weaving erratically and had taken out a couple of mail boxes before she got to me. They kept up the chase, trapped her in a driveway, took her keys and called the police. She’s in jail with a $75,000 bond. 

When pink elephants get drunk, they see Julie. In North Carolina a driver is legally drunk with a blood count of .08. Hers was .27, over three times the limit. I was wearing a bright yellow and black padded riding jacket. After IMPACT, she probably got out of the car to see what hit her. Looking at me, she thought, “That’s the biggest bumble bee I’ve ever seen. Must be a killer bee from South America. I gotta tell my honey about this.”

MMM, MMM, Good…Vitamin M! IMPACT was about 4:45 p.m. on Saturday. By 3 a.m. when everyone finally gets everything they want from me, they introduce me to morphine, Vitamin M, my best friend for the next few days. Every two hours I can ask for Vitamin M and it will drip into my veins, washing the pain away. I think of soldiers laying on the field, wounded way more than I, with no Vitamin M. I feel lucky. I’m in Acute Care. The good news: I’m not in Intensive Care. The bad news: I’m one step away from Intensive Care. There are four patients in the room. One just moans and groans. The twenty-something kid next to me has staples in his head, a broken leg, a catheter through his privates, IVs in his arms and straps to keep him in bed. Unfortunately, he can’t understand that he’s in a hospital. He wants to get out of bed and go to the bathroom. He pulls his IV out with his teeth. He calls for his friends and his mom and thinks he’s in “The Cave.” When the nurse gives him his bed bath, he says “show me your tits” and tries to get her into the bed with him. The next day his parents visit and attempt to convince him he’s in the hospital. He doesn’t get it. He just wants to get up, go to the bathroom, go home. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be unaware of my injuries, unaware of where I am. I feel very lucky.

The fourth patient mainly shouts obscenities strung together, repeated over and over and over: “god-damned fuckin’ doctors are all cock-suckers god-damned fuckin’ doctors are all cock-suckers” etcetera etcetera all night long. (That’s not how I was taught to speak to people who are trying to save my life. I’m gently chanting: “Nice, 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 to go?”) Kid Clueless next to me yells to Mr. Obscenity asking if he has a knife to cut his straps so he can get out of there. Mr. Obscenity hisses back, “You’re gonna die over there, you son of a etcetera etcetera” all night long. I feel luckier every minute.

Sunday I revisit several of the machines so Dr. Nameless can see if my bones had 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. Over the next nine days, I learn the various techniques, or lack of them, used by the herd of blood letters getters. Two or three 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 favor the “shotgun” technique: blast away, check to see which hole is bleeding the most, drill a little deeper in that area, cover up the wound with wide, industrial tape guaranteed to extract entire hair follicles when removed.

Dr. Nameless and the Four Ceps determine I’ll be ready for foot surgery on Monday. Do not eat or drink anything after midnight on Sunday. (Even though surgery is scheduled for 5 p.m. Monday?) 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.

At Baptist Hospital, Jello is an entire food group. The cooks have learned to levitate any substance within Jello: whole pineapples, beef cutlets, living octopus. Even though I mention a few times that I don’t eat meat and would like to speak with a dietician, meat arrives and dieticians do not. Vegetables are cooked for three weeks or until they’re unrecognizable, whichever comes first.

After every meal, a nurse asks what percentage of the meal I eat. I never score very high in this area. Even after the third day, when I finally get to choose the food for each meal, I still don’t score well. This is the South, where most people are above average on the weight chart, in fact, some folks are so big, they use their satellite dishes in the backyard as lawn furniture. Health seems to be determined by size. “Y’all eat this platter o’ fried chicken, fried hush puppies, French fries and biscuits, and you’ll be big and strong.” Many of my nurses weigh 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 realize 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.

On Monday Scooter takes a trip to Wonderland. A cute, female anesthesiologist introduces herself as Allie and leans right over my head as she speaks with me. At this point she’s the only doctor who actually has a face and a name. She recommends a local anesthesia instead of a general and creates a special chemical potion from the Sixties. Allie in Wonderland makes my operation better than the Mad Parter’s Tea Hattie--about fifty festive people work on me, special machines float my body around the room and my motorcycle is brought in to make sure the foot fits on the peg. Whatever drug she used to put me semi-under, I would take every day. I don’t even want to know what it is.

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 two silver pins connected with a black bar, nuts and bolts protruding out of the side. Christened FRANKENFOOT, it is guaranteed to scare young children in public. I cannot put any weight on this foot for two months. 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.” Now, I don’t mind the words “foot powder” used together, but I don’t like to hear “bone” and “powder” used near each other. Later 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.” ( Previous page ) ( Next page )

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