On Friday evening (Feb 17th) I went out for dinner, then a drink (literally one), and then set off to ride home.
It was raining, but nothing out of the ordinary and at about half past eleven Iwas passing Meadowbank on my right, and approaching the MacDonalds drive through on my left. The road there is wide — a lane and a bus lane in each direction — and there was very little traffic, so I would have been riding at something like 15 MPH in the middle of the bus/cycle lane.
I saw a car coming from town, just to the other side of the white line. I don't know if it was signalling, but based on its road position and speed, I was sure that it was going to turn right into the drive-through. I judged that we would reach the entrance at pretty well the same time, and if the car continued as it was, I would be clearing the entrance just in time for it to turn in without any bother. Everything was as it should be.
But the car didn't continue as it was: it cut the corner slightly. It wasn't going terribly fast, but I suddenly realised it was already on my side of the road, and there was no way I could avoid a collision.
My bike hit the car. My recollections is not perfect, but I think I remember seeing my front wheel crashing into the front/side of the car, followed by a brief moment of no sensation — indeed, darkness — and then the pain of my face hitting the road.
Moments after that, I heard someone — presumably the driver of the car — shouting "What have I done?" "Are you OK?", and (the cyclist's favourite, this one) "I didn't see you!".
I realise it probably made it look like I was out cold — or worse — but before I tried to move, I wanted to take stock of my situation. I lay still, literally checking whether I could still feel, and wiggle,my toes and fingers. I then tried slightly larger movements to to see if any part of my body would have the kind of acute pain that I guessed would signal something being broken.
As I lay there, I was aware that there were people — voices — and I could hear someone on the phone, calling an ambulance.
Once I'd completed my bodily functionality check and preliminary damage assessment, I started to slowly and carefully sit up. A couple of people urged me not to move — citing instructions from the 999 call — but I really did not want to go back to lying in a puddle pressing the injured bits of my face against the tarmac so I finished sitting up, all the while looking out for unexpected pain.
Someone — I think from MacDonald's — handed me a pile of napkins, with which I soon confirmed that I was bleeding — not profusely, but enough to feel the blood trickling on my face — and that I had injured my right hand severely enough that even dabbing my face was painful. I could see my bike lying on the road a few yards away, and I thought I was aware of the car being somewhere behind me.
I'm not sure how long I sat there for — at the time it felt like "five minutes", and I don't think it could have been much more than ten.
During this time, the pile of napkins was augmented by a generous quantity of paper towel, and a young woman told me she was a nurse that lived nearby, and said she would fetch me a towel.
It was just starting to dawn on me that sitting on tarmac in the rain was not the best place to be, and maybe I should think of moving somewhere more sensible — somewhere warmer, dryer, and hopefully softer. But then someone said the ambulance was coming, and soon after that, I heard the siren and saw the ambulance pull up.
A few seconds later, the two guys from the ambulance were talking to me — checking whether I was coherent and then helping me to stand and get into the ambulance.
Climbing into the vehicle was a challenge: I needed to grip the handle by the door, and my right had did not want to play that game.
Once inside, the guys told me to sit on a bed/trolley, take off my coat and cardigan (and also my socks and shoes, which surprised me) and then lie down so they could examine me.
I realised I was shaking quite violently, but they said that this was adrenaline, and was nothing to worry about. I also made a point of telling them I was on Warfarin (see my previous blog post for the enthralling details), and they seemed to recognise the danger that this posed: if I had any kind of internal bleeding, it would not stop as quickly as it normally would, and that could be A Bad Thing.
Someone connected me to a blood pressure machine, and put electrodes on me which, I guess, were for monitoring my heart rhythm. Then one of them checked me over, telling me to say if I experienced pain while he pressed various places and moved my joints. They also checked my cognitive state — I remember being asked a handful of "pointless" questions that included the current year and month (though not the name of the monarch, which I was more than half expecting). They also discussed the injuries to my face — in particular my forehead. One of them commented that one wound to my forehead was "pretty deep": when I asked what he meant by this, he peered at it for a few moments, and then said "Well, I can see your skull".
While this was going on, there was a knock on the door of the ambulance, and a paramedic arrived. He had a brief chat with the ambulance crew, the upshot of which I believe was that they felt they were in control of the situation, and he could go on his way.
Shortly after that there was another knock, and this time a policeman came in. He asked me my name and address, and to tell him what I thought had happened. While I was doing that, his colleague joined him, saying that a minicab driver had seen the incident and had left his contact details. Once I'd finished telling him my memory of the incident, he said he was going to talk to some of the witnesses who were waiting around; he would be leaving my bike in MacDonald's, that
it was likely that the driver would be charged with careless driving; and that he would be back in touch tomorrow to get a formal statement.
Then, after a couple more minutes of dabbing blood (I believe I got through a significant proportion of the ambulance's stock of gauze), the ambulancemen strapped me in to the trolley, and we set off for the Royal Infirmary.
I couldn't hear any sirens, and we seemed to be driving "normally" (steadily, and stopping occasionally for traffic lights), which was reassuring, but also a bit disappointing...
During the journey the medic with me was asking me about what I did and where I lived — not, I suspect, because he wanted the information, but because he wantd to keep me talking, and thus obviously conscious.
After what seemed like 10 or 15 minutes (and some quite astonishingly rough roads), we pulled up at the Emergency department of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Someone brought a wheel chair. There was a pause while they repeatedly told someone that they could not go into the department the way they were going, and they had to go round. They they wheeled me into a concrete corridor where I sat for (I think) 10 or 15 minutes — long enough for me to be joined by another wheelchair carrying a young guy who sat very still and silent — during which time folks enchanged paperwork and looked me over. I'm guessing this was to confirm the ambulance crew's assessment of my situation.
After that, I was wheeled into the body of the hospital, and into one of a number of curtained-off bays in a fairly large room where half a dozen folk in scrubs were walking purposefully from bay to bay. After a few minutes, two of them approached me and asked me various questions about how I was feeling. The woman then left her colleague to ask me about my medical history. In particular, he asked what medication I was on: I replied "Warfarin", and "nothing else", he said "oh, that's good". When I asked him why he'd said that, he said that most people my age were on a lot of different drugs. After this, the woman returned, they spoke for a while, and then she told me she would arrange for me to have an X-Ray of my hand and a scan of my brain in case of haemorrage. That's the joy of being on anticoagulant.
After this I was wheeled deep into the building, to very large room with well over a dozen — maybe 20 — curtained off treatment bays round the edges and a large central counter/island in the middle.
This place was "busy". In addition to the treatment bays, which were all occupied (or at least had their curtains closed) , I saw over a dozen people lying on trolleys, looking very ill, and very much like they had been there a long time. There were maybe another 20 folk sitting around, I was wheeled into a gap in the row by the central counter and settled down to wait. And wait...
I asked roughly how long I could expect to be waiting, and was told that it was likely to be around eight hours...
I wasn't surprised that Friday night at A&E was very busy. I was surprised by the average age of the patients I could see — and in particular the folk sying on the trolleys. They mostly looked (considerably) older than me. I don't know whether that reflected the age distribution of the patients, or whether those who were younger and less in need of constant observation were in some other waiting area.
I saw at least a dozen staff moving about my half of the area. They wore scrubs of various colours, and with various badges. While some were obviously medical, a significant number were doing things like cleaning and tidying (I have no idea how many blood-stained gause pads I dropped), and occasionally offering a cup of tea, or wheeling people from place to place, including those who needed to go for a wee...
Everything seemed very organised and calm — at least, provided you ignored the continual beeping of what I assume were monitoring machines — and for the most part things went very smoothly (if slowly). At one point, though, I heard a nurse sternly rebuking a patient with "I know you've been waiting 8 hours, but he has been waiting 10 hours, and that's why I'm seeing to him before you". There was also a Very Restless Woman who from time to time would start shouting "Nurse! Nurse!" and then start wandering in random directions, so that the staff had to steer her back to her seat.
After sitting there for "a long time" — until I'd guess about 3AM, but that is a guess — a policeman arrived and asked whether I would like to give a statement about the incident then, or would I rather wait until tomorrow. I joked that since I didn't have any other plans for the evening, so I might as well do it now, and he sat down next to me.
We talked about my recollection of what had happened while he asked me questions and then typed a summary of what I'd said into what looked like a mobile phone. I found myself thinking that while this was clearly a step up from a notebook-and-pen, things might well have gone faster if he had got the phone to take dictation, or even just recorded what I had said. I mentioned the minicab driver having left his contact details, and my policeman said that he would be hoping to talk to him after he had finished talking to me.
In the midst of all this, we had a fine demonstration of Sod's Law: I had said/joked that I didn't think I would be going anywhere for the next couple of hours, But we were in mid-conversation when a nurse arrived to take me to have my hand X-Rayed. This took maybe ten minutes (with a doctor to review it in due course), but we hard hardly resumed my statement when another nurse arrived to wheel me off to have a CT scan of my brain, to check for bleeding.
With the policeman gone and the scan and X-Ray done, I realised the exciting parts of the night were probably over, and the rest was going to be even more boring. So I did my best to close ignore the bustle going on around me, pulled out my phone and started solving "Very Hard" puzzles on my Kakuro app.
I got offered a second cup of tea at around 6AM and then, not long after that, I got moved to a trolley, which made me realise that things were now much quieter than they had been: there were still a couple of monitoring machines beeping away, but it now seemed more like listening to a conversation than a chorus.
Finally, some time about 8 o'clock, a doctor came to my trolley and wheeled it and me into a treatment bay. He looked at the various bits I said were sore, and when I mentioned the X-Ray and the scan, he said he would check them, too (I really, truly hope that somebody else had checked at least the scan before that exchange). He told me that I had a "clean" cut that could be glued shut (another of the marvels of materials technology we take so much for granted). But there was another wound was more complicated — he wasn't sure what to do about it, so he said he would clean everything up and then consult his consultant.
However, just as he seemed to be getting into his wound scrubbing stride, he suddenly stopped. "That", he said, referring to some part of the background noise that I had managed to blot out of my awareness, "means I have to go and help with a resussitation. I'll be back as quickly as I can...". At which point he hurried off, leaving me in the treatment bay.
A few minutes later, a woman with an air of authority appeared, and said that I would have to move, because they needed the bay. So I walked behind her as she led me to a chair more or less exactly where my wheelchair had first been parked some 8 hours before.
Resussitations take longer than I would have guessed. During the coming hour and some, I got offered another cup of tea, and a bowl of corn flakes, and took myself off in search of a loo. During that expedition,I noticed something: there are no mirrors in A&E — not even in the toilets. More than one person has said that this is not accidental...
I think it must have been about ten o'clock that my doctor got back. He took posession of a nearby vacant treatment bay for me, and then after a bit more wound cleaning, went to get a second opinion on what to do about my complicated wound. "One suture here, one up there, one across there and one there" he was told. And so he duly went into action, first finding some vials of local anaesthetic and what looked like an enthusiastically wrapped christmas present (albeit using plain white bpaper). I think it took him two or three minutes to glue the "simple" lasseration, and something like 15 minutes to administer the anaesthetic and insert the suggested four sutures, at which point his enthusiasm got the better of him, and he decided to do one more to tidy things up.
Once he'd done, he told me I should get the sutures — there were five of them, he said, repeatedly — checked, and possibly removed, in five days time. After that, he put a bandage over the stitches and said "that's it, you can go now".
This was easier said than done, since I had no idea where the exit was:so after I'd put my shoes on, I had to ask one of the staff for directions. The way out was down a corridor, and then another, which led to a pair of doors the opened into a large waiting area in which there were a couple of dozen people — well — waiting.
At first I thought they were friends or relatives waiting for patients, like me, to come out. But when I noticed that beside the door I had come through there was a counter, complete with a safety screen that stretched up to the ceiling, I began to wonder whether this area was in fact the first stage of the queue to get seen — a stage I had skipped because the ambulance crew judged my condition to be sufficiently serious that I needed to be kept under observation...
On the wall beside the door I had come through there was a large display screen which was saying that there were currently 85 people (presumably patients) in the department, and that the wait time was currently 9.5 hours, though it wasn't clear whether this was the time until someone starts treating you, or until someone can avoid being caalled away by emergencies long enough to finish treating
And so, close on 12 hours since my journey home had started, I was on my way again...
I got home about midday. I thought about going straight to bed for a nap, but decided that this would be likely to seriouly disrupt my sleep pattern for several days, and I'd do better to just stay awake until "bed time". So that's what I did.
The following day, I realised that several other bits of my body were sore: most obviously my thighs, but also my arms. A noticeable chunk of my face was covered in firmly-attached, rock-hard scab, I had developed really noticeably black eyes (which got even more pronounced as the day wore on) and my top lip was so swollen that I kept whistling between my teeth as I spoke.
Obviously, in an ideal world the car driver would have had his wits about him and not doubled his drive though experience by driving through me. But if there had to be "an incident", I don't think it could have gone much better than it did.
I will always remember the sense of relief when, lying on the road, I confirmed that I could still feel, and move, my feet and hands, and that nothing (major) was broken. Things could so easily have been so much worse. As it is, it looks like for the next few days I will be "sore", and less than usually handsome, but that is "it".
The ambulance got to me really quickly, and both the crew and every member of staff I encountered at A&E seemed competent and very focused on their jobs. Even the folks at MacDonalds did their best to help.
The obvious thing that could have been better was the wait time. I suspect many of you will guess the party political comment have omitted at this point The policeman also commented on the fact that I was not wearing a cycle helmet, and that is something I will have to think about.
