If you hit a semi truck with a car, you will be deflected a lot more than the truck. If you hit one a glancing blow with a motorcycle, you will be deflected rather dramatically and not just in the physical sense.
On Monday November 1 2021 I was in the concluding 20 miles of a nice ride in a mountain valley in Georgia. I was on route 48 headed west, a few miles from the Alabama border running at the speed limit on a dead straight stretch of road. A semi truck pulled out of a gas station right into my path. I think he was fueling up and had a bit of a head of steam leaving the pumps. Instead of stopping at the edge of the gas station and the road, he gave a quick glance and kept coming. I thought he was turning left into my lane. The police report says he was turning right which is even worse. Judging by the angle of his rig, he was going to need to go on to the shoulder of the wrong side of the road to complete his turn. Wide turn indeed. He had no business in my lane at all. I have been riding for 45 years without a major incident, mostly due to my ability to see stuff coming and find an escape path. I don’t know what happened here. The truck was coming out mighty fast and I was slowing down and trying to miss him. Maybe I got a case of target fixation and hit him or maybe he left me no room. I guess I’ll never know for sure. I remember seeing the right front fender of his truck coming at me and thinking, “this is going to suck” and then waking up laying on the side of the road with paramedics looking down at me with my left knee hurting something awful. The paramedic said I had a compound fracture in my lower left leg as they loaded me into the ambulance. One of them asked me if I had a hospital preference. I told them I didn’t make a habit of using them so, no. They took me to Erlanger in Chattanooga because it was the closest trauma center. Every bump that ambulance hit, and there were many, caused a wave of excruciating pain in my leg.
At the end of the painful ride I found myself in the Erlanger emergency room. It was a busy place. They determined that I wasn’t going to bleed to death, gave me some pain medication and took me for full x-rays and CAT scans. Then it was back to the ER. No open rooms in the hospital so I had to spend the night there. At some point they decided they needed to somewhat align my leg bones and put the leg in a splint. To keep me from being in screaming agony while they did this they gave me an injection of a drug called ketamine. They didn’t tell me what to expect. It is a powerful hallucinogen. You don’t feel the pain because you are on a trip to who knows where. At one point I thought they had killed me and I was in the afterlife, calling for Jesus. After what seemed like a frighteningly long time, I started getting little glimpses of reality that got longer and longer and finally I was back in the ER with my leg wrapped up in a splint feeling rather dazed. I was actually out for about 10 minutes. Before my first surgery, I asked my anesthesiologist about the stuff and he told me ER’s like to use it because it doesn’t suppress breathing or heart rate so they don’t need to using breathing tubes and such. It is sold as a street drug because some folks find the experience fun. No thanks. Don’t think I want to do that again.
I spent a long sleepless night in the ER, occasionally getting my pain medication topped off whenever I could get someone’s attention. Late the next morning I got trucked up to the operating room and got introduced to the team. My surgeon told me he was going to put two pins in my thigh and two pins in my shin that would stick out through the skin and be connected to two external rods. This was to pull the bones into alignment while we waited for the swelling to go down enough to perform the final repair. He asked if I had any questions and I said, “Yes, are you any good at this?”. He was a bit taken aback but gave me a short overview of his resume and said he was a perfectionist. I was now pretty confident that I was in good hands. Lights out, wake up in recovery and then on to my hospital room.
People like to post things on social media about how much they admire and appreciate nurses but unless you have been lying helpless in a hospital bed for a week you have no idea what they and the nursing assistants that have been renamed patient care technicians really do. When you can’t stand up, you can’t get out of bed, and you can’t wipe your own behind, you gain a full appreciation of what these dedicated people do. The care I received during my stay in the orthopedics ward was unbelievable. The nurses and tech’s were all kind, caring, and attentive and my hospitalist (the doctor in charge of your care at the hospital) was such a pleasure to talk to I looked forward to her visit every day.
The first Thursday I was there, my nurse came in for her morning rounds trailing a young nursing student from a nearby Christian college. She overheard me telling someone about my ketamine experience and that I had been calling out to Jesus. She asked me if I was a Christian because she was and I said, “Yes, and there is an interesting story of how that happened that I could tell you if you have the time”. She said she did just as the orthopedic PA came in to change my dressing. She said, “Maybe another time” and started to leave. The PA had overheard our exchange and said, “No, you sit right there and listen to him tell it”. So he changed my wound dressing while I shared my testimony with this young lady. When he finished he said, “Well that went a lot better than I thought it would”. I told him he distracted me by having me talk to the young lady while he was working. “Not my first rodeo”, he replied. Maybe they both needed to hear it. It was a high point of the day. Later she asked if it would be OK to pray over me. Of course it was OK.
The surgeon thought they were going to send me home for a couple of weeks to wait for the swelling to go down but when it was going down much faster than they thought it would they kept me there and did the second operation exactly a week after the accident. The second one hurt about 5 times as much as the first one. Pain medication kept it under control a bit but they did a lot of work in there. Two plates holding my tibia together and a titanium rod going up my fibula from the heel to nearly the knee. Four days later it was time to get discharged and for a while they thought they were going to send me home, still unable to go to the bathroom or stand for more than a few seconds. My wife was understandably freaking out. She really was not up to that level of care. Luckily, I was transferred to a rehab hospital in Gadsden instead.
The day before I was to leave Erlanger, I asked my patient care tech for the day if there was a single person who all the nurses and techs on all the shifts reported to. One big boss. She said yes. I asked if she had an office on this floor. Yes again. I asked if she would come to my room and talk to me. She said, “I guess, if there’s a problem”. I said there was no problem but would she ask her to come see me. About a half hour later the lady in charge arrived in my room looking a little apprehensive. I told her that the care I had received over the last 9 days was amazing and that since I wasn’t going to be able to see all the nurses and tech’s who had attended me would she please personally thank every one of them for the care they provided for me. She was very appreciative of the positive feedback. Everyone who gets bad service complains. Most people get good service and say nothing.
I got to the rehab hospital in the middle of the afternoon on a Friday. They did a quick evaluation and scheduled me for 3 hours of therapy the next day. I was at an emotional low. Depressed and discouraged to tears. They had cut down my pain medication so my leg was throbbing and I had no idea how I was going to get through three hours of anything. To top it off my roommate watched Fox News all day and night. I felt I had died and gone to Hell. I started texting people from church asking them to pray for me. I asked my nurse if she was a believer and would she pray with me. She said yes and asked if it was OK to get a couple more of the nurses. I said OK and a little later we had a prayer meeting at my bedside. I felt a little better and started to hope, if not believe, that somehow God would get me through the next days and weeks.
Saturday morning one of the patient care techs came to get me up and dressed for therapy. She helped me stand up and I immediately felt light headed and dizzy and said I needed to sit back down. “Uh uh”, she said and plopped me down in the wheelchair. She was a large gruff sounding woman that I found out had a heart of gold. Off I went to the rehab gym. This day was mostly upper body exercise and some brief attempts at standing for a minute. I got through it and was trundled back to bed. One of the rehab doctors came to visit and asked me how I was. I made the mistake of telling him the truth. That I hurt and was down and discouraged. He asked if I wanted to try an anti-depressant and I said no, prayer and meditation would get me through. He offered a couple of different types of drugs for anxiety and depression and I firmly declined.
Sunday was a day off so time for some rest. They increased the dose and frequency of the pain meds which got my pain under control. Monday I got to meet my therapy team. I have changed the names because I don’t have their permission to be mentioned. Nancy was the therapy technician, responsible for ferrying patients to and from the gym and various other helper tasks. She was a preternaturally positive young lady. So much so that it had to rub off. She overflowed with love and gave it out to everyone she touched. I looked forward to seeing her every morning for her smiling good morning and a friendly pat on the shoulder and “You have a good therapy session now, baby”. There was a group session which was basically calisthenics and then one on one for an hour each with a occupational therapist and a physical therapist. My OT, who we will call “Carol” was a talkative and friendly person. We quickly discovered a common interest. I mix sound for my church and she was mixing sound for the livestream at her church. We talked and talked and the boring exercise hours went by quickly. My afternoon sessions were with my PT who we will call “Susan”. Susan is one of the most impressive young women I have ever met. She has a doctorate in physical therapy and has dedicated all of her adult life to serving others. Just an amazing person. I fell in love with her by the second session. Not some silly romantic notion but her heart just touched mine and that was that. Now I couldn’t wait to get to the therapy gym to talk with Carol and Susan. It turned my whole attitude around and now I was glad to be there.
Susan was trying to teach me to use a walker but I am not allowed to put any weight on my bad leg and when I stood up with it hanging I had pain in my hip so bad I couldn’t do anything. She came up with a way to sling my bad leg with a strap on the walker so I could begin some serious work. The only problem was that my heart rate would jump to dangerous levels with only moderate exercise and would stay well above 100 bpm at rest. The head doctor at the rehab came to see me and suggested putting me on a drug to lower my heart rate. I pushed back and told him to review my medications because I thought something they were giving me was causing it. He was skeptical but agreed to have a look. He came back a little later and said the other doctor had put me on buspirin, an anti-anxiety drug that I had tried in the past and quit because it raised my heart rate. I told the doctor and asked why his colleague would put me on something when I expressly asked him not to. He had no answer and the other doctor avoided me for several days. After this I made sure every nurse read out every medication before I took the handful of pills.
It took about 2 more days to flush the buspirin out of my system and my heart rate started acting normally so Susan and I could do some more strenuous treks with the walker and lower body exercises. You see, using a walker to steady you when you have two good legs is one thing. Using one when you can only use one leg is quite another. You have to lift your whole body weight with your arms for every step. Walking 40 feet meant picking up 190 lbs 20 times. Very strenuous. Susan taught me how to get out of bed and into the wheelchair and back using a walker. One step toward self sufficiency. I felt wonderful. Then Carol taught me how to get from the wheelchair to a toilet and back. Woohoo! No more bedpan and back to wiping my own behind.
Susan continued to work me to go farther with the walker until I could do 50 feet, rest a bit and go 50 feet back. 50 feet being the furthest you can walk in the average house before you are outside. Then she taught me how to get in and out of a car, how to use the walker up and down a wheelchair ramp and then to use the wheelchair on the ramp. By the end of the two weeks I was ready to go home except I was going to miss Nancy, Carol, and Susan.
My discharge day was Friday after thanksgiving. Carol and Susan were working on Thanksgiving but Nancy wasn’t. I was sitting in my wheelchair at the back of the gym with Susan next to me when Nancy came by to give me a hug and say goodbye. She started to bend down to the wheelchair when Susan said, “Stand up”. Perfect. Stand up like I taught you and hug Nancy like a man. Friday morning arrived and it was time to leave. I got a visit from most of the staff and my care coordinator. I told her I wanted to see my therapy team before I left. She said they could wheel me by the gym on the way out. I said, “No, I don’t want to just wave as I leave, I want to talk to them”. After a few minutes Carol and Susan came to my room. I stood up (like Susan taught me) and told Carol how much I enjoyed the time we spent together, that I loved her and hoped we met again someday. I told Susan that we had made miracles happen together out there in that gym and I didn’t know how I could love her more. I hugged them both, blinked back my tears and headed out for home.
That’s the physical part of the story. Now the rest. The theme running through all of this is love. My wife was driving over an hour every day to see me, have dinner together, and help me wash up every night. I was reminded every day how much I love her. I did not expect the level of care I got at either of the hospitals or the love I felt for the nurses and technicians that cared for me. I didn’t expect to love my hospitalist at Erlanger. I sure didn’t expect the love I felt for Susan at the rehab hospital. During my last two days there we talked about it at some length. There is plenty of time for talk while exercising. This was not the first time I was in a situation requiring major help when God put a person in my life that I loved so much I would do anything she asked me. A few days earlier I had asked if she was a Christian, she smiled and said she was spiritual. I pressed that a little bit. I asked if she believed in a God that was capable of working in people’s lives. She did. She told me she wasn’t raised in religious household but due to living in the Bible belt she had went to church as a teen for a while and got disillusioned with it. I told her I completely understood. Churches are full of people whose actions make it clear that they don’t really believe what they say they do. Jesus tells them to love everyone and they only really love people that are like them. Most people would think I should have started trying to talk her into accepting Jesus, right then. That would have just shut down the conversation. I told her to keep an open mind and always seek the truth. That’s how I worked for me.
The last session I had with Susan ended with both of us in an empty gym talking about love. I had told her how I believed that God had put me in her care for a reason and that my love for her was a natural consequence of that. That it was why I had made such progress in the rehab and how I was able to have a positive outlook every day. Love is the ultimate motivation. I also told her that I believe that we had an infinite capacity for love and that people failing to realize that was the cause of petty jealousy. People think that they have a finite amount of love and that loving more people means dividing their love into smaller and smaller portions. Your friend meets a new friend and you are jealous because you think their love for the new friend is taking love away from you. It just isn’t true. You can give your whole heart to as many people as you can. We have an infinite capacity for love, but we have a limited ability to love. We should spend our days learning how to love more and more people more completely. Loving other people is what fills our heart and the more and deeper we love, the happier we are. Susan told me other people need to hear this stuff. I agreed but my experience is that most won’t listen. Love is what makes all good things happen and people bottle it up like they are hoarding a limited supply, instead of letting it flow through them to touch as many people as possible. We often say that God will make something good out of anything that happens to us. Sometimes I am not sure I believe that. In this case He has. I was reminded every day how blessed I am. For a month I was surrounded by caring people who have made it their profession to help others. They restored my faith in humanity. I have family that loves me, a church family that loves me, and friends in recovery that love me. More importantly, I was reminded how much I love them. My heart is overflowing with love and that is getting me through the pain and temporary disability. My advice to anyone who reads this is seek to love. Learn to love more. Stop participating in the “us versus them”. Learn to love them. Be like Nancy. Pour your love out on everyone you can. Those you can’t, pray to learn how to love them too. Fill your heart. Don’t wait until you get hit by a truck.
