Humbled by so many heroes after my rather ugly bike crash

IWAS nearing the end of my bike ride and starting to think about things to be done when I got home – empty the washing machine, nip to the shop for wine to take to my girlfriend’s, check online for…

Too much attention on other things. There was perhaps a tenth of a second between seeing the wall and slamming into it, just long enough to register alarm that I was no longer on the cycle track and to realise there might be trouble ahead for my left leg.

Yup. Big trouble. It wasn’t so much the pain that confirmed it but the horror movie when I looked down at it a moment later. Is that my leg? I sank to the grass verge at the side of the track, fumbled in my bag for my phone and dialled 999.

The washing was staying in the machine. The meal out was off. That apart, who knew what the next hours and days held as, ambulance summoned, I lay back and stared at the Glasgow sky because I couldn’t bear to look down

there again? The weather was glorious. Absurdly, it occurred to me I should have put on sun cream.

‘You all right, mate? Just having a lie dow… oh my GOD!’ The first witnesses were arriving and, with them, some answers about the shape of the next few days.

NHS Scotland is in crisis. Waiting times? Within an hour I’d be lying on my back, staring at a hospital corridor ceiling and waiting. Too much misadventure, not enough triage rooms, not even at the £842million Queen Elizabeth Hospital which opened just two years before my unscheduled arrival on Saturday.

But whatever else is wrong with NHS Scotland, it isn’t the people. The people were magnificent. Humblingly so.

My first NHS hero was not even working that day. He was an anaesthetist from the Jubilee Hospital in Clydebank who happened to be cycling by with his young son, moments after my crash.

‘Can you move your toes? Is anything else hurt? Here, take some water. You need to stay hydrated.’

His son, maybe seven years old, was still on his bike. ‘Can we go yet, dad?’ I question the young chap’s knowledge of the Good Samaritan story.

‘No, we’re going to be here a bit longer.’

A minute later the boy watched his dad help a bloodied stranger 200 yards to the nearest road. He’s a good man, his dad. My arm was around his shoulder, so I know he didn’t even flinch when I told him I was a journalist.

I told my second hero, the ambulance paramedic, I was worried my summer holiday might now be cancelled. He agreed that would be a shame. Last year his summer holiday was placed in jeopardy, too, when an uncooperative patient high on who knows what sank his teeth into the paramedic’s hand. A good call-out for him is where the patient is happy to see him.

We chatted some more in the hospital corridor. Perhaps for too long. He certainly seemed to think so.

Urgency

The urgency related not simply to my leg wound, which he seemed to think was neither life-threatening nor, indeed, leg-threatening in any case. More to the point, time spent waiting to hand a patient over is time when ambulance crews are unavailable for other emergencies.

After perhaps 45 minutes, the waiting over, he shook my hand and wished me luck for what lay ahead. I wished him peaceable patients.

And so the second hero gave way to the third. The A&E consultant who examined my leg told me I’d need an X-ray and then surgery. She said I’d need a general anaesthetic and that ‘plastics’ might need to see the wound. That raised the prospect of a skin graft.

But her candour was welcome and I responded with some of my own: ‘One more thing I’ll need – the toilet.’

So began a complex operation, the intimate detail of which I will not trouble you with, but it involved a shot of morphine and a large bottle. ‘Why do I need something so strong?’ I inquired woozily. If I remember correctly, it was because she knew from experience men can only pee standing up.

Evening found me on a tenth-floor orthopaedic ward in what hospital press officers might describe as a stable condition. I would describe it as comfortable but terror-stricken.

Some time the next day, I knew not when, I would be taken to theatre. Who knew what state the wound would be in by then? Gangrenous, probably. Inoperable, I shouldn’t wonder. And the paranoia deepened overnight.

‘I think they’re going to cut my leg off while I’m asleep,’ I said in an early-morning text to my girlfriend.

I repeated those concerns to hero number four, the theatre nurse, when she arrived a few minutes later to discuss the parameters of the operation.

‘Are you sure they’re not going to do anything drastic?’ ‘Good grief, of course not.’ In fact, in terms of accident victims heading for surgery, she said I had won the lottery. Nothing any medical professionals had seen suggested any other prognosis than a full recovery. How ridiculously lucky was that?

On her arms I saw evidence of skin grafts.

‘But I completely understand how you’re feeling,’ she said. ‘Trust me, I’ve been on the patient side and the nursing side. Nursing is best.’

So it was with peace of mind, not panic, that I went under the knife. And when I came round, the news was good. Knee intact, no ligament damage, no plastic surgery – and the wound was closed.

If you want the short version of what I’d done to my leg then, well, I guess I’d cut it. That said, the pictorial evidence of said cut, taken in hospital before treatment, is best viewed with smelling salts nearby.

Hero number four helped wheel me back to my room and, in all the giddy postoperative chatter, I forgot to say what an immeasurable blessing to her place of work and NHS Scotland she is. I am saying so now.

Hero number five visited my room a few hours later and talked me through what he had done while I had been sleeping.

And, when he had gone, I managed to eat up every mouthful of the not-too-disagreeable-actually fare on my dinner tray.

I then reached for the automatic bed-recliner gizmo, lay back and stared for a long moment at another section of hospital ceiling.

A stupid lapse of concentration, a fall, and hero after hero after hero … Tears came. I left hospital the following morning after receiving lessons from a physiotherapist on how to negotiate stairs with crutches.

‘How long do you think I’ll need them?’

‘Maybe six to eight weeks.’

Murder

I gave her one of those hard stares which murder hunt detectives are wont to give pathologists in crime dramas when they are told the lab results won’t be back until a week on Thursday.

She gave me a better look which said ‘Patience, patient’. Hero number six.

Scotland is an irascible wee country. Spend too long around its politics and it can seem as if moaning about this and belittling that is our national daily bread.

Focus too closely on the perma-rage of those in public life who shout the loudest – the shrill, the borderline demented, the gratuitously profane – and the place can appear bloated beyond all prescription with its own self-importance.

Maybe more than a few of those bombing up and down cycle paths of a weekend are, like me, just trying to clear their heads.

Anyway, on my most recent bike ride, I saw another side of Scotland, its people and particularly its health professionals. They brim with humanity. They care. The rest is mostly froth.

And the scar – however angry it may look when the bandages come off – will remind me of that.