The hospital - Part 4
Updated: Aug 10
The ride to the hospital was surprisingly calm, considering the chaos we’d just come through. Mike, the paramedic, worked with steady hands, wrapping the worst of my bleeding cuts. He told me he needed to check for other injuries, then slipped off my shirt and cut away my jeans. When he asked whether I had another pair of pants with me, I admitted I had no idea if any of our things from the bike had made it into the ambulance.
His colleague appeared holding a pair of black rain pants with a clip‑belt. “These were found at the scene,” he said. Apparently, that lone pair of rain pants was the only clothing that had made the trip with me. Worst comes to worst, I thought.
Once Mike finished examining me (nothing seemed broken) we talked. He asked where we’d been headed, and when I mentioned calling the B&B to warned them about our delay, he waved it off. “That can wait.” He asked about my work, and when I told him I was a military veteran, he lit up, telling me about his uncle who’d fought in WWII. I told him honestly that paramedics do a noble job, and that their exposure to trauma, and the risk of PTSD, is far more constant than what most soldiers ever face.
We pulled up to Sunnybrook’s emergency entrance just as another ambulance arrived. The driver pointed out that Dave’s rig had left first, yet we’d reached the hospital at the same time. Dave was wheeled in ahead of me, and I heard him call out, bright and cheerful despite everything: “Hey, my love, are you okay?” I shouted back that I was fine and asked about him. He gave me a thumbs‑up, though he couldn’t see me returning it from behind, I gave him one as well. His voice was so upbeat, so alive, that I asked, “Did they give you drugs?” He confirmed they had.
He disappeared into the trauma section, and I was left waiting in the hallway on my gurney. Mike and his colleague were talking about the call. “Did you know there were two victims?” his partner asked. Mike shook his head. “No, I thought it was just one.” Then he added that the dispatch had reported a female in her twenties, VSA—Vital Signs Absent. I told him I knew the term well; back in 2006, during Operation Athena, I’d heard it too many times as Adjudant. “Wow,” I said, “you thought you were responding to a twenty‑year‑old VSA. This is nothing like that.” He nodded, saying it wasn’t unusual for the call to be wildly different from reality.
After a few minutes, I said goodbye to Mike as I was rolled into the Blue section of the ER (for minor injuries). A nurse lifted me into a bed and told me someone would be by soon. Dave, I learned, was in the Purple section for major trauma and would be getting a CT scan.
Alone at last, I finally looked at myself properly. Both elbows were raw and bloody with friction burns. I snapped a couple of photos. My right knee had three burns the size of toonies—thankfully my jeans had protected my legs. I was wearing only one shoe; the other one had slipped off my foot during the impact, the remaining one had shredded laces. My sock on the bare foot was torn open, blood seeping through. Aside from another small cut on my left ankle, that was the tally of my injuries. I was stunned. I’d been thrown off a motorcycle, violently tumbled across asphalt, and somehow walked away with only scrapes. Painful, yes—but minor. I thought of Dave insisting I wear gloves, and of the lucky star that seems determined to follow me through every reckless adventure.
A nurse came by and said the doctor would see me before I could be released. Because my elbows looked bad, I’d be getting X‑rays of my elbows, and my wounds would be cleaned and properly bandaged, but I’d have to wait. So I waited.
Maybe half an hour later, I heard someone in the hallway say, “The wife is in number forty‑six, right?” Seconds later, a nurse appeared at my bedside. “Dave sent me,” he said. “He wants me to check on you, and he wants you to know he loves you.” I told him to reassure him, I was perfectly fine and to tell him I loved him too.
Less than thirty minutes later, another nurse arrived, also sent by Dave. “He has a strange message for you,” she said. She paused, then delivered it: "He wants me to tell you: I have the world by the balls and I win." What? I had to think about it for a second… What did he mean by I win? Before long I realised that he meant he was more injured than I, so he was winning the “injury level”! Typical Dave to brag about something like this. Then the nurse talked about how Dave would not shut up about me, repeating how he loved me and how he needed me to be okay. I told the nurse that I am used to Dave being such a romantic. The nurse added that Dave was such a good trauma patient. She said that he was funny and kind; a nice change from most of the usual trauma patients. When she left I told her to tell him that I said : "I love you more". I added that he would answer “Impossible”… (Our little romantic saying).
About two hours after arriving at the ER, I was finally wheeled off for X-rays of my elbows. Up until that moment, I had no idea hospitals employed people called transporters, staff whose sole job is to wheel patients from one part of the hospital to another. My transporter brought me to the X-ray corridor, where I waited another twenty minutes before being rolled into the imaging room itself. I immediately regretted leaving my phone behind in my original room. With no screen to distract me, I looked around the hallway and noticed a man who appeared to have an injured leg, possibly a broken one, as he, too, was waiting for an X-ray. When he was eventually taken in, I spotted a motorcycle helmet resting on the rack beneath his stretcher. If anything, it reinforced my belief that I should never climb onto a motorcycle again.
The technician X-rayed my right elbow first, then turned the bed around to image the left one. As she did, she suddenly exclaimed, “Oh! You’re the wife from the motorcycle accident!” Before I could respond, she continued. “Your husband was here earlier and would not stop talking about you and how much he loves you.” That made me wonder how many people Dave had talked to since being admitted to the ER. He must have spent quite a while in the X-ray department because the technician knew where we were headed (Niagara-on-the-Lake) and why: to attend the Shaw Festival. She even commented on how chill we were for a couple who had just been through a traumatic accident. Then she added that, with a bit of luck, we might still make it to Niagara-on-the-Lake the next day. Her optimism reassured me and gave me hope that Dave’s injuries were not too serious. Later that evening, I even googled ways to get to Niagara on the Lake with public transport. Spoiler alert: we did not made it to Niagara-on-the-Lake!
To be continued...
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