Kiss My Knits!

Tuesday morning, my husband biked off to work as usual. He commented on his way out the door, “You know, I’ve saved $60 by biking instead of taking the light rail!”

Later that day, he was felled by the irony bandit.

At 4:30, he called me from the road. “Hi, hon, I’ve had an accident. I ran into a crossing gate and tore my arm up pretty good. I think I’m going to be okay, but there’s an ambulance coming and I’m going to the emergency room.”

I was so grateful that he called me himself, so that I knew he wasn’t unconscious and could get a read from his voice that yes, things weren’t good but he wasn’t going to keel over. The ambulance was approaching, so I told him that I would come as soon as I knew which hospital he was going to. Then I let him go, freaked out internally for about two minutes, and then calmed back down and went into hyper-competent mode.

I told Em that Daddy was fine, but he had hurt his arm and was going to the hospital and we’d be going to the emergency room to pick him up shortly. She took it in stride. I got a call from some guy named Matt (I don’t remember his last name) saying that he was on his way to Carolinas Medical Center. I found out later that Matt was good Samaritan who stopped when he saw that Steve was bleeding by the side of the road. Steve could not both apply pressure to his wound and get to the cell phone in his pocket. Many, many thanks for Matt for stopping and calling 911.

It turned out that “we’re going to go pick Daddy up” was pretty optimistic. I’d forgotten how long it takes to get things done in the emergency room. Em and I waited around with Steve for an hour or so. We also called a friend to come and pick up Steve’s bike, which was undamaged. The EMTs had kindly transported the bike and helmet along with Steve in the back of their ambulance, then locked it in the decontamination shower room until we could retrieve it. Kudos to the paramedics also for their swift response and great bedside manner, and many thanks to Laura for picking up the bike and bringing it back to our house.

Em got to look at the inside of an ambulance, and also to see all sorts of new and interesting people in the ER. However, it was taking a long time, so I took Em home. My mother came over to watch her so I could go back to be with Steve. Good thing, too, because it was well past her bedtime before we were seen.

Steve was in kind of a weird place. He was injured enough to get moved to triage, but not quite injured enough to be seen immediately. So several times he was moved to triage and then moved back to the waiting room. This sounds like a bad thing, but you really don’t want to be the case that gets seem immediately. There was a family waiting on a man who had broken his pelvis and some ribs when a tractor turned over on him, and some other man who was in intense pain that had him throwing up every few minutes. We’d rather wait than be one of those guys, thanks.

I did manage to use some of my Spanish to talk to a woman with a crying baby. Some in the ER were getting impatient with the noise and wanted her to take the kid out of there, assuming the baby just needed to walk around. She tried to communicate something by holding up an empty milk bottle, but it turned out that the baby didn’t need milk. When I spoke with her, it turned out that she wasn’t the baby’s mother, and that’s who the baby really wanted. Even if I couldn’t help with her immediate needs, she was grateful to have someone whom she could understand.

Steve got hurt around 4:30 and hung around the waiting room, bandaged, with his bloodstained shirt half cut off of him, until after 9. We were finally seen by a med student named A.J. He was a nice guy and we liked him. Unfortunately, he used fast-absorbing sutures when he should have used nylon ones, so he had to stitch Steve up twice. So while Steve should have gotten 12 stitches, he actually wound up getting 24. Oh well. Here’s a picture of the wound two days after the injury. He also has some pretty severe road rash on his right knee which also requires a bandage.

We got home about 11pm, six hours after the whole thing had started. They said in the ER that it was actually a slow night. I have a renewed sympathy for those who have to use the ER for their primary medical care.

Here are the logistics of how it happened. Steve was attempting to ride past this crossarm along the sidewalk, more or less along the same path as the dotted orange line on the pavement. After the crossarm, a bike lane runs parallel to the train along Old Pineville Road. So Steve was trying to skirt the edge of the crossarm, but was in no way trying to beat the train or cross the tracks.


There are two six inch bolts sticking out from the side of the crossarm. They blend into the gray metal background so Steve didn’t see them until the first of them was ripping a gash in his arm. Side note: there’s a giant ant colony right there, so he was picking tiny ants off himself for hours in the ER.

Steve gets his stitches out next week, and it looks like he’ll have full use of both arms and legs when all is said and done, but we do want to follow up with the city on getting that bolt taken care of.

Both the police officer who took the report and the EMTs who responded commented that there was no good reason they could see for a freakin’ six inch bolt to be jutting out like that. We’re going to contact the light rail folks and let them know about this so they can look into filing it down. That $60 Steve saved on light rail, the light rail has gotten back from him in blood.

In fairness to the city, it’s bad enough that it’s sticking out so far, but if you look at the traffic cam for that particular day and time, you’ll see the true culprit making a bad situation worse…

THE SQUIRREL!