At Accident & Emergency I was wheelchaired into a cubicle and then helped gingerly onto a trolley. The next few hours were pretty hazy: I was dead tired, hungry and thirsty and my arm was only ever a degree away from a whole new world of stabbing pain. An A&E doctor and a succession of nurses (whose names I forget; my resolve to remember them varied inversely to the degree of discomfort I was in) came in to clean up my arm, take down my details and feed me some painkillers. Most of them asked what I did for work, and so I explained in detail about the medical imaging applications we write, and how ironic it was that I’d been visiting the ERI’s Radiology department only a couple of weeks ago.
“Any chance of a CT scan?” I asked, ad nauseum.
The A&E doctor eventually had me sent for an X-ray. This was not fun. It was, in fact, the least amount of fun I’d had since falling off my bike in the first place. I was wheeled through to an adjoining room and then had to get into a chair by the X-ray machine under my own steam. My God, it hurt. I wasted no time in relaying this to the nurse, switching seamlessly from another appeal for a CT scan.
“I was down here the other week at your radiology department, you know—oh, you want me to get up? OH JESUS CHRIST.”
She directed me to position my elbow at a 90° angle on the end of a table. Eyes watering, I tried to do so.
“Just a bit more.”
“Argh.”
She moved the X-ray machine into position, moved off to the control panel, and returned again. She took another X-ray and helped me back onto the wheelchair. I repeat the next exchange verbatim:
“How does it look?” I asked.
“It’s pretty bad,” she said. “It looks like it’s broken in maybe 5 places. You’re doing well—most people would have passed out from the pain by now.”
Dripping with sweat, throat dry and smashed elbow cradled pathetically in my lap, I almost laughed. My night was made.
A surgeon named Mr Woods came along to take a look at me a while later. I was a little more lucid by then; the general horror had worn off and a sort of self-deprecating coping mechanism had taken over. I was going to be polite and helpful if it killed me. He prodded around the elbow a bit, mulled over the X-rays on the A&E PACS workstation, then called his boss. I heard some murmuring about coming in that night, but in the end he came back across to tell me that they would operate first thing tomorrow morning. I must admit, it sounded daunting.
“Your arm is broken in about 7 places.” (This figure seemed to vary based on who was doing the talking.) “We’re going to clean out the puncture wounds, then put in a couple of plates to fix your humerus back together. It’s about the worst fracture of this type I’ve seen, and there is a small risk of nerve damage or infection. We’ll take you up to the ward, then come and get you again in the morning. No food or drink until then, okay?”
Dehydration from those few glasses of wine, and nothing to drink since then bar a couple of fingers of water to wash down the painkillers meant I was absolutely parched. “Nothing at all? I’m really, really thirsty.”
“We’ll put you on a drip. That should take away the thirst.”
He wrote “ORIF→” on my right wrist, the arrow pointing to my elbow, and explained that this meant “Open Reduction, Internal Fixation,” or an open surgery to set and fix the bone with plates and screws.
The A&E doctor came back then to put on a temporary cast, incredibly managing to do so with almost no motion of my arm, and then a nurse came back to hook me up, putting a cannula into my left arm and attaching it to the first of an endless stream of bags of saline solution. I was left alone for a while and called Ash to explain the accident and my current sorry state. With that done, I sat back to try to relax a bit. The muscles in my arm would occasionally spasm, twitching the bones and making me wince involuntarily. I looked around to take my mind off it. With the cubicle curtain left open, Mr Woods, still at the A&E desk and looking at something on the PACS, could see me peering over at his monitor.
“Want to see the X-rays?” he asked.
“Can you get me a CT scan as well?” I checked. “No? Then the X-rays will do.”
I was wheeled over on the trolley, and he swung the screen around so I could see it. This is what he showed me:
X-ray (before): “There is some…deformation.”
I was momentarily lost for a polite way to respond.
“Holy shit.”
They wheeled me to a quieter cubicle to let me get some sleep, then I was taken upstairs and into a ward with three other sleeping casualties. It was about 4 am, and the operation was supposed to be at 9 am the next day. I slept as well as I could, waking up to take a couple of awful, jarring trips to the toilet with the whole of my awareness concentrated on my upper arm, where I could feel the bones rotating uselessly against themselves despite the cast. I collapsed back into bed to wait for the morning.
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