Happy 44th Birthday to Me - Part 1

After much deliberation this past spring, I bought a mountain bike.  I wasn’t breaking up with road riding, I was just going to mountain bike as well.  All I wanted was a cross-country bike; at 43 I had no interest in catching air or those crazy adrenalin rushes that the kids are after today.  I like my bones.

Learning to mountain bike on the north shore has been a steep learning curve.  The trails are unforgiving, and I’ve taken a number of falls in the learning process.  The thrills always far exceeded the bumps and bruises, and eventually the bumps and thumps were less frequent.

So for my 44^th birthday, I thought maybe it’s worth just trying the bike park at Whistler – just once. I wasn’t getting into downhill riding; it was just going to be a one off thing.  We’d be sensible and do the Bike Park 101 program, which included rentals, a lesson and 3 rides up on the chair lift.  Lessons are a good start, right?

Our group of 4 newbies and a guide headed up for our first run.  We learned some basic skills and headed down the trail.  Our first trail was “Upper Easy Does It”.  My dear sweet husband stayed behind me, as I did my best to keep the other 3 riders in sight.  Every time I caught up to them they were still panting, so I didn’t feel too bad for being the slow one in the group.  We’d stop to regroup, talk about what to expect on the next section and set off again.

High on adrenalin, we headed up for a second run.  We came about half way down to an intermediate skills park.  With our confidence increasing we all rode way faster and the “wee” factor increased.  After success on all the drops in the skills park, we headed down our first blue trail, “B-Line”.  There were a few gentle rolling drops our guide told us as we headed down.

We swooped down and around a few corners.  Up ahead there was a bit of a rise and I kept my speed to stay in touch with the rest of the group.  As I reached the top of the rise, I realised I had caught air. What the hell!! I was completely unprepared for it.  At some point I lost my bike beneath me and thought, “Oh crap, this is going to hurt”. 

I came down with a thump of my head and remember thinking “ok, I survived that”, and then bounced and hit my head a second time.  With the second blow to my head I also hit my left hip.  The pain seared through my hips.  I was lying on my left side, with my face inches away from the muddy ditch water, but all I was aware of was the raging pain in my hip.

Within seconds my husband and our group leader were by my side.  My first desperate plea was to be rolled over onto my back because the pain on my left side.  They gently rolled me onto my back and assessed my injuries.  Head was fine, no obvious broken bones, yes I could feel my toes, but no I couldn’t move my leg.  Not being able to move my left leg alarmed the group leader and she quickly called bike patrol.  In the meantime, one of the members of our group was assigned to go stand at the top of the hill and ask riders coming down the trail to slow down.

“Rider down on the left side of the trail; OK to roll around on the right, just take it slow”, I heard him say over and over again, and I’d wave to the passing riders. Some asked if we needed help, or whether bike patrol had been called, others just had that “Phew, rather you than me, sister” look on their faces as they passed.

Bike patrol arrived and went through the same routine.  Head OK? Yes. Did you lose consciousness? No. Can you remember these three words: blue, tree, dog? Blue like the sky, trees like I’m seeing them from this angle and dog like yappy puppies. No my legs don’t hurt. No my arms are fine. Yes I see the blood on my hand but I can move my hand. Blue Tree Dog.

While we’re playing twenty questions he’s checking my body for broken bones.  He pushed my hips together and it felt fine.  Pressure from the top of my hips reignited the searing pain and I whimpered.  At that point he made the call that we needed an ambulance. Blue Tree Dog.  I remember having a bad case of the shakes. I wasn’t shivering or cold, I was just trembling, perhaps from shock or the pain.

The ambulance part 1 arrived in the form of a little jeep-like vehicle. They slipped me onto a spine board, slid the spine board under through the roll bars of the jeep and strapped me in securely.  Everything was super efficient, and no one even groaned when they had to lift my weight into the truck.  The driver gingerly went up the trail, but despite his best efforts I was jostled about painfully.  He was kind enough to distract me with his own broken pelvis story.  I tried to silence my chattering teeth and keep breathing deeply so stave off the looming sense of hysteria.

At the top of the trail, we were met by ambulance part 2 – a real ambulance this time.  After another painful transfer, we headed down another bumpy road.  Once again, the paramedic had a personal tale of mountain bike injury to share between apologies for the bumpy ride.  We bounced our way down the mountain and over to the clinic as he took blood pressure, pulse and temperature readings.  At this point everything hurt – each transfer was painful, the gaps between the floor tiles jarred my busted hip.

At the clinic I was immediately rolled into a little cubicle and nurses hovered over me taking the same readings the paramedic had taken in the ambulance.  Another nurse searched my arm for a suitable vein and started an IV.  They poked and prodded around my pelvic girdle to find the injured area.  As they did so, they each told me their mountain biking injury stories.  They asked me the same set of questions and checked that I could wiggle my toes.  This time I had to remember green, hope and taxi. I told her I still remembered blue tree dog and was afraid of mixing that up with green hope taxi.  She laughed and said if I still remembered blue tree dog, I was probably ok.  I was still trembling uncontrollably, and they covered me with warmed blankets. 

At some point a doctor arrived who asked all the same questions the bike patrol guy, the paramedic and the nurses had asked.  No I didn’t lose consciousness, yes I could turn my head, no it doesn’t hurt to breathe, yes I can feel my toes when you touch them, look, I can even wiggle them.  He held up my cracked helmet and said “You’ll understand why we’re concerned about a head or neck injury”.  I pulled the blanket up to my nose and didn’t say anything.

The doctor left and the nurse came back with my first morphine fix, this one via my IV.  Before I would leave the clinic in Whistler I had another shot via IV, and then an intramuscular one later on as well.  Moments later I was whisked off to x-rays where I had more transfers to deal with. Ouch! There were more chest and neck x-rays than there were hip x-rays, but I’d seen the helmet, I wasn’t complaining. 

By the time I was wheeled back into my cubicle, my x-rays were already displayed.  I looked over the pelvic girdle one trying to understand what I was looking at.  When the doctor came in, I looked up at the ceiling as if I hadn’t been trying to figure out my x-rays. 

“Well? How bad is it?” I asked guessing from the look on his face that there would be at least some bad news.  Obviously and optimist, he started by pointing out that neck, back and chest were all ok. The hip joint was fine and there was no displacement of the femur.

“But you have fractured your superior and inferior pubic rami,” he said, pointing to the little ring at the bottom of my pelvic girl.  If you looked reeeeally closely, you could see the jagged line of a broken bone on the top and bottom of the circle. The fractures were both stable, he explained, but I would have to be transferred to Lions Gate Hospital where they would determine whether surgery was required.

He left and the nurses came back to get me ready for the road trip with the next available ambulance. They told me not to be alarmed if they used sirens and lights, but with the heavy traffic at this time of day - what time of day? I had no idea what time of day it was – they may need to use the sirens to get me back to Vancouver quickly.  My biking clothes were removed and replaced with a typical blue hospital gown. Then the shivers came back. More warmed blankets were placed over me, and a magic hose of warm air was placed underneath the covers.  I asked for a drink of water, but was declined, in case surgery was required in Vancouver.  The IV would keep me hydrated I was assured, and they offered me a disgusting lemon swab to moisten my sawdust mouth.

I lay there breathing deeply to keep myself together – between the shivers and drugs and all this talk about ambulances and surgery and sirens, I knew if I started to cry I’d turn into a weepy mess.  Around me I could eavesdrop on the conversations the clinic staff had with some of the other patients.  We all came from the bike park – some of us more injured than others.  There was a guy who didn’t know where he was.  Another guy couldn’t remember the green hope taxi words, and a woman beside me somewhere sobbed in agony as they cut off her trousers to assess her leg injury.  This was where I thought, for the first time, this maybe ain’t so bad.

Then there was a bustle of activity as the ambulance team arrived and came by to introduce themselves.  They explained the sirens and lights business to me again and then there was yet another transfer from the hospital bad to the ambulance gurney.   With all the morphine in me, it didn’t hurt nearly as much, as long as they kept my left leg elevated at just the right angle. During all this excitement, I got the IM shot of morphine.  The intramuscular shot had a delayed start the nurse explained, so would only kick in in an hour or two, since they didn’t know how long I’d have to wait to be seen in the ER at Lions Gate.  I vaguely wondered just how much morphine was in my body at that time.  My dear husband was dispatched to go and pack up our condo unit that we’d rented for three nights and used for one, and then head home to Vancouver to come and see me in the hospital.  I thanked the nurses for their gentle care, and told them I hoped we'd never meet again. "Unless it's on the trails", one of them answered with a glint in her eye. The doctor suggested I try chess for my next birthday. Everyone's a clown up there.

And we were off, heading to Vancouver, sirens wailing,  What did I do? Mostly I dosed off.