We scare because we care. (Monsters, Inc.)

It wasn't my first visit to an emergency room. The first time was when I was a kid, competing with my next door neighbor to see which of us could swing highest. Coming down from the very top of our highest arc, laughing at the fun of it all, our laughter suddenly turned into hysterical screams when, Billy, my neighbor's pet goat, wandered into the path of our swings. The goat survived with a minor lump or two. My neighbor got stitches for an ugly gash on her shin. I broke my collarbone.

This visit to the emergency room, a lifetime later, was because of a bike crash. Al and I were out on a group ride. Someone lost control of his bike and swerved into me. Fellow riders handled moving us off the road, calling the police and ambulance, and answering all the necessary questions. I was put on a stretcher and lifted into the ambulance. I had identification and my insurance information with me. (Never go biking without them. And there is one thing I am going to add to my bike wallet: a laminated card with the names of my doctors, a brief list of my medications, and a note about my most important medical conditions. I fumbled to give them this simple information, and it made me feel frustrated and helpless.)

Here are the two points that I didn't know would be important:

1. My bicycle helmet came with me in the ambulance to the hospital. 
2. How fast I was going when the crash occurred was important. It determined which hospital I would be taken to. The faster you were going, the higher the level of trauma care they anticipate you will need.

When I arrived at the hospital, I was whisked into the emergency room. At this point hospital protocols took over. I was immediately put into an examination room, and the first of wave after wave of nurses, doctors, and other hospital staff began coming through. My lycra bike clothes (or rather what remained of them) were removed, and every bump, bruise, scrape, bit of road rash, and other areas of suspected injury were quickly probed and catalogued. My helmet was examined, and they actually discussed whether and where the helmet had hit the pavement. (They even matched up some minor abrasions on my head with the cable ties used to secure my helmet mirror to the helmet!) Then I was rolled off for head to toe CT scans. Back in the examination room, more questions from the doctors, more people walking in and out. The doctors pronounced that I had a broken pelvis. I had also fractured a vertebrae in my neck. There was some concern about the possibility of internal bleeding in the area of the duodenum. There was damage to a vertebral artery leading to the brain. That artery was a serious concern and their first priority. I was whisked off to a Neuro ICU, my hospital home for the next 12 days.

If you have never been in an ICU, all you need to know is that patients are hooked up to all manner of monitoring machines. This in addition to IV drips and the like. I teased the nurses that leather bondage fashion would make as much style sense in an ICU as hospital gowns. From the patient's viewpoint, an ICU is a place where everything beeps and pings, constantly, 24 hours a day. But it is also an amazingly comforting place. (Then again, that may just be a result of whatever they added to the IV drip running into my arm.) In the next hours I was whisked off for MRIs and blood was drawn repeatedly. My last memory of the evening was a doctor coming in and summarizing my condition and reviewing what was going to happen next.

Was it scary? Of course, it was. But my personal take-away was this: Everyone that was part of this experience, from the ambulance attendants to the trauma team to the nursing staff, knew what they were doing and did it well. Am I OK? Yes. Thanks to the excellent care at the hospital, I am feeling good and am on the mend. The doctors say I will probably be able to start riding again in January.

And, oh yeah, I learned something valuable about my friends and family. Not one person suggested I should stop riding my bike. Not one. And they all asked, "Is the bike OK?"

Are these great people, or what?