2009-07-30: Tram lines
Cycling south on Lygon just after 09:00. The clearway has ended and some cars are parked in the left lane. About 500 metres north of brunswick road Lygon street widens so I merged into the left lane. Thats where I got caught.
Over about two seconds the bike went wild on me. I had a glimpse of the front end too high, then falling with the steering hard over to the right but I knew I was gone right then. I fell hard on my right side. Hips and arm were numb. Back pack still on. Taking stock. Fingers on my right side still work. Right elbow and shoulder are all wrong. The arm doesn't move right. It looks like a structural problem.
People started to gather around. Somebody asked if I needed an ambulance. I wanted to walk home but I knew I had a broken arm now. So I said yes to the ambulance. Somebody offered to look after my bike and gave me their business card so I could find them again. They put my helmet and security card in my back pack.
The ambulance turned up. Two paramedics. A man and a woman. The ran a full checklist. Numbness, finger movement. The state of my right Humerus. Look for evidence of spinal damage. Look for evidence of a damaged Pelvis. They couldn't be sure about the spine so decided to "pack me up".
They gave me some kind of anasthetic to inhale through. They cut off my irreplacable winter cycling top (every tear, hole and scrape told a story). They immobilised my neck. All in all a great job. Just before we left a police officer poked his head into the ambulance and asked me what had happened. I explained about the tram line.
So we got to the hospital. Taking it easy. The two ambulance officers unloaded me from their vehicle. The guy spoke to a nurse doing triage "we scraped this guy off the road...". So shortly after that they transferred my from the wheeled ambulance bed to a wheeled hospital bed.
Various doctors and nurses were coming and going. Running the same checks as the ambulance people. Finally a senior doctor pronounced my spine and pelvis clear of damage. They took off the packing. During this time they hooked up an IV line and started to drip saline and some Morphene into me. Under the morphene the day started to go quite fast. The same doctor put a temporary cast on my arm. That hurt but so did practically everything else. Then it was off to X-Ray. The doctor had told me that X-Ray had been out of action for a while and now that I have one of their CDs it is obvious why. They send out windows DLL files with their data. Their system is a massive source of computer virus infection. Its no wonder they have problems.
The ambulance people had suggested that I might need a pin in my arm but the bone specialist came around and said no, it should heal with just a cast. So they wheeled me off to a small operating room. Somebody told me that the stuff they were going to give me would make me forget the procedure and that it would be better if I went into it with happy thoughts.
Well I forgot about the happy thoughts and endured a very strange 10000 years of hell apparently featuring things from my life twenty years ago which start with F. It mostly featured the FACOM and the FA18UCF. I had no idea how I got there and no idea how to get out until my wife appeared in a little window in my visual field. I told her solemnly that I had had a terrible epiliptic siezure so she went off to tell the doctors that. After a while I started to figure out where I was. They had had me on pure oxygen for a while but it didn't taste any different from normal air. The morphene didn't do anything for me except reduce pain and put me to sleep. I don't see how people get addicted to the stuff.
So I spent the night in hospital. Every two hours the drugs wore off and they gave me more. The next day I stood up for the first time in twenty four hours and walked slowly to the car.
