My Night In the Emergency Room
September 30, 2011, By Tom McNulty 1 comment
One moment, I was riding my motorcycle down a quiet—and wet—residential street trying to beat the rainstorm home. Then, suddenly, I was staring up at the ceiling of an ambulance with an EMT asking if I remembered my name (yes), where I was coming from (no) and the day of the week (I guessed and was wrong).
“You were knocked out for a while there,” he said. Then, “blahblah towing bike blahblahblah garage’s card blablah in your wallet blah.” Got it.
Although this story will always contain the word “motorcycle,” as in a beefy Harley-Davidson chopper, my “hog” was actually a 150cc CF Moto scooter. In its defense, it could reach 60 mph, had large tires (not those small ones that make you look like a cartoon character riding a clown bike), and was black (all the better to terrorize the townsfolk).
At the hospital, ceilings floated by above me before the gurney arrived in a curtain-enclosed bay. I was at downtown Minneapolis’s Hennepin County Medical Center, whose legendary ER has earned it the nickname “St. Gunshot.” It would be a night to remember.
A businesslike doctor and a young intern determined I had no broken bones—just some grogginess and a few sizeable scrapes on my right arm, leg and face. Then a CAT scan (no brain trauma), x-rays (no broken bones), and an ultrasound (which showed I had to urinate, a fact I’d been aware of for quite a while…really, really aware).
However shipshape I seemed to be, they wanted to observe me for a few more hours just in case.
Survival of the fittest?
A busy, big-city ER on a Friday night is kind of like the Final Four of the Darwin Awards.
The young guy in the bay to my right had been drinking when his buddies urged him to do a “flip” in the kitchen. When he tried, his feet caught on the counter and now here he was with a dislocated shoulder. He was drunkenly verbal even when no medical personnel were there, loudly bemoaning the fact that a glorious Friday evening was passing by and he could do no further drinking.
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