Express Yourself

Notes from an Emergency Room

Deciphering some old after-accident thoughts

In July of 2019, both tires on my road bike blew as I was riding. I put my foot down (wrong move); my bike kicked me off, and I landed on the back of my head. I was on a busy road, so I tried to get up, but I’d been knocked for a loop and couldn’t. I can’t remember now if someone pulled in behind me and helped me to the side of the road or if I got there by myself, but I sat there for some time whilst another person, a nurse, stopped in her car to help and helped me to call an ambulance and then saw me loaded into it. “Do you think I should just go home?” I asked the nurse.

“No, with a potential head injury I’d like to see you go to the hospital,” said the nurse, so off I went.

Between tests and scans, I sat in the waiting room and called my husband intermittently. (He was out on his own ride.) At some point I asked for a piece of paper and a pen. I haven’t looked at this piece of paper since then, although it migrated from being taken home from the ER in my helmet to the garage to the kitchen counter to the dish where we drop our car keys to the junk drawer and somehow ended up in my office, where it rightfully belongs.