The ride up was typically brutal, but the view from the top was typically amazing. And, there's always the reward of the fun part, which is riding *down* the mountain at breakneck speed. We got back to the house around 3, where I decided to reward myself with ice cream and a shower, in that order. I decided to fire up back episodes of Colbert and just chill out while I ate the ice cream.
Joel, not satisfied with having done that much biking, and possessed of a love for chocolate greater than anyone I've ever known who is not actually female, decided to bike into town and get a giant bar of fancy chocolate from the hippie grocery store (in which everything is organic and overpriced). Normally I would mock him incessantly, but having done that severak times in a row, and being somewhat tired, I simply waved as he headed out.
3 Colbert episodes later, I decided to take that shower, vaguely noting that Joel seemed to be gone a lot longer than he normally is when he goes on a chocolate run.
After a long leisurely shower, I got dressed and eventually wandered over to check the phone. There was a message from a random 650 number, which I assumed would be something work-related, a new family needing tutoring perhaps. So I decided I would listen to the message and call back shortly.
When I did finally listen to the message, it was from Stanford Hospital. It said: "Joel was in an accident. He is fine, but you should call in when you get this."
Uh oh.
So I call Stanford Hospital. Joel has been hit by a car and is in the emergency room. I can come down to see him at any time. So I get things together quickly, and drive over the hill into Palo Alto to the hospital.
When I arrive, Joel is surrounded by a couple of nurses, who are cleaning his wounds with Q-tips and tiny squirt guns. He is heavily bandaged, and everything not bandaged is basically a giant road rash. They're cleaning out the dirt and tiny pebbles from all the open road rash. It's pretty gruesome. So, I'll share a couple pics I took...
Joel when I arrived.
Joel immediately after the nurses finished cleaning him. Note that he failed to use this god-given opportunity to get some digits.
Joel with the bar of chocolate that he almost died trying to procure. It also survived the crash, though it didn't ultimately survive Joel.
Joel, finally leaving the hospital.
Joel's clavicle. Ultimately, they had to do surgery & put a titanium plate in there, & tie the bones to it. Although painful, it moves Joel a tiny step toward his goal of becoming a cyborg.
The final tally of the damage: 4 broken ribs, 1 broken clavicle, 1 mildly sprained ankle, one actual chunk of flesh missing from his arm near his elbow (every time Joel raised that arm I had to look away- it was the most gruesome by far), and road rash over basically everything else. Glasses destroyed. The helmet did its job though- no head trauma at all. The helmet was cracked completely.
I leave the hospital around 11pm, and walk out to the garage. I get in my car, drive to the gate, and see the sign that says "After hours, pay at the self-service station in the garage." So I turn around, park again, and find the self-service station. I stick my ticket into the machine: $6. I get out my credit card, and look for the credit card slot.
Which has a metal plate bolted over it. Cash only, apparently. A quick examination of my wallet shows $2. OK, no problem, I keep spare change in little baggies in the car (organized by coin type- the first time Keiko saw me filing my change away we had the following exchange:
Keiko: "You organize your spare change??"
Me: "Uh, yes."
Keiko: "Wow, baby."
Me: "Admit it- you're a little turned on right now."
Keiko: "Yes babe, I have never been more hot for you."
Anyway, I go back to the car and discover that the big bag of quarters is not there, because I used it for the BART to go up to SF during the week, and left it in my backpack, which is at home. So all I've got is some dimes and nickels. Adding up all those, plus a couple coins on the floor, takes me up to $5.65. The annoying thing is, I've got enough with the bag of pennies, but the machine won't take pennies. I double-check this and then kick the machine.
So I go back into the largely deserted hospital, and after wandering around awhile, find someone who can direct me to the ATM. The ATM, of course, charges me $3 for cash, since it's rather predictably not a Chase/WaMu/Consolidated Barely Solvent Megabank atm, which means that my Chase/WaMu/Consolidated Barely Solvent Megabank is now also going to charge me $3 for the sin of using another crappy bank's ATM. Thus, my parking cost will literally double b/c the parking folks haven't figured out that ONLY DRUG DEALERS STILL USE CASH.
Dammit.
Joel comes home late the next day, and is pretty loopy from all the meds. Plus, the only way he can sleep is on our Sofa of Death (once you lay down on it, you will basically keep laying on it until you starve- it's weirdly comfortable), wedged up against it on his side so that there's no pressure on his various broken bones.
The next day, Joel's mom came down to stay a few days, which was nice. I was crazed at work and couldn't do all the helping he needed. But after she went to bed that night, Joel had trouble sleeping, and asked me to help him put new bandages on the giant open wound that was the left half of his back. That involved the following steps:
1) peeling off the existing bandage, which had been placed on while the wound was still actively oozing/lightly bleeding, and hence had become congealed. That's a LOT of surface area to peel congealed bandage off of, and poor Joel sang songs to himself while I slowly peeled away and tried not to cause too much fresh bleeding, which I was reasonably successful at. I offered to get him a towel to bite down on, but he muttered something about manhood blah blah blah, so I didn't press the issue.
2) once the old system of bandages was peeled off, the wound was freshly oozing/bleeding a little, and I said: "I can't put a new bandage on this without wiping it down a little." So I got a washcloth, put cold water on it, and lightly cleaned the wound. This process confirmed my long-held belief that I am in no way, shape, or form cut out for a career in medicine. I used a skill acquired in traveling in 3rd-world countries, which is: find the part of your mind that is really grossed out by what's happening right now, and pull the plug.
3) I had a box of 3" x 3" bandages, a roll of tape, and a single contiguous wound constituting 1/3 of the total surface area of Joel's back to bandage. An additional complicating factor was that Joel is basically a lowland mountain gorilla that's evolved a capacity for speech and baseball fandom. So I said: "I'm not going to be able to securely bandage this without trimming some of this hair."
So, we trooped into the bathroom, and I got out Joel's shears. We stood in the bathtub, and I proceeded to shave his hairy-ass back.
Joel: "So, you've finally gotten me bent over in the shower like you always wanted."
Me: "Hahaha. Remind me again exactly which ribs are broken?"
Joel: "Don't make me laugh... it hurts."
4) After the shaving, I proceeded to carefully assemble a patchwork of bandage over the entire wound, and it did serve the purpose of covering the wound and allowing him to sleep. The entire process took over an hour. But I figure it helps the balance in my karma account, which empirically speaking, seems to not be particularly good. Either that, or I've inadvertently stored all my karma in a Consolidated Barely Solvent Megakarmabank.
The real lessons of this story are:
1) Chocolate can kill you. It almost killed Joel.
2) Had I simply mocked Joel as I was tempted to do, it would have delayed him a few precious seconds as his lowland mountain gorilla mind formed a comeback, thus putting him not quite in the right place at the right time to get hit by the car. (A zipcar, with a dude, his GF, and his GF's mom. That's gonna make a good impression on mom.) So I told Joel that I will never again willfully pass up an opportunity to mock him. It's for his own safety.
For more details of Joel's saga, check out his blog: http://aufrecht.org/
No comments:
Post a Comment