A bit of a break Pt1

I was reading Sandys blog earlier today. I like her blog, the writing is good and she seems to have this knack of holding your attention. However like all Americans she cant spell doughnut and I’m sorry Sandy, but all of your American English arguments will fail when I ask you if they are made out of dough or do.
Anyway, language arguments aside, Sandy was blogging about a bad hospital experience that she had a while ago and it reminded me of one of my own, so I thought that I would blog it for posterity. This is quite a story so I may have to do a couple of parts.

My story goes back to when I was 22 and I rode my Suzuki 125cc motorbike to and from work every day. At the time I was a baker and I started work at 4am every morning. On this particular day I was heading home at about 1pm having finished my shift. 
My plan for the day was to end the relationship that I was in because I had been chasing another girl for a while and she was just starting to take an interest. I have always been like that, I don’t like the idea of playing games with two relationships at once. So even as a young man I would leave one before moving the Cinderella search to another.
I was visualising the end of this romance to myself and not paying full attention to the road when I suddenly realised that I wasn’t on my bike anymore, I was actually on my back on a hard road. And flying toward me like a targeted rocket from the sky was my Suzuki 125.
It was all in slow motion, I remember trying to roll out of the way but I couldn’t because I was sliding on my back I clawed the ground with my fingers, to stop, but then something hit my left arm and I don’t remember anything for a few minutes.

My next memory is the man punching me in the chest, for some reason I thought I had been asleep in bed and was being woken up by a burglar who was punching me. I remember shouting 'f*ckoffyoub*stard' then I lay wondering why I had woke up on a main road. The nasty man who had been hitting me shouted 'oh thank god' then sat on the kerbside and started to cry.
There was a woman with one of those two wheeled shopping carts walking backwards and forwards saying "I saw it I saw it", then she would sob and say " I heard the bike hit him" then she would walk up and down again repeating the whole thing. The crying man was being comforted by a young woman and I suddenly realised that I was the cause of all the fuss. Not only had I had some sort of accident, but I did it in such a way that I ended up being attacked by my own bike.
I actually lay on the road and said "wow". Then I started to take stock, it was fairly obvious by now that there was no one in the area who was going to come and talk to me, there was a long line of cars and lots of people driving past the accident, I could hear the cars, but I knew that there was one thing I was not to do, and that was move my head to take a look.
My biggest worry as I lay on the road was a broken neck. I knew that I couldn’t trust my bodys feelings, if you break your neck you can say 'oh I will move my feet' and you could feel them move, but they wouldn’t actually be doing anything. This being the case I would actually have to visually see my appendages move. So I lay on the road, on my back, in my helmet and lifted my left leg straight up until I could see it. There was a scream from the trolley lady. I was relieved, but I think she was reliving day of the dead.
I was over the moon, I was so happy I started to giggle, I had lifted my leg and seen it, so just to make sure I lifted the other one.....there was another scream. I started to giggle even more and I decided to sit up very very carefully. Its all down to adrenalin, but I sat up a lot faster than I meant to. I looked at the crying man and said, "necks good, backs good" then I went to push myself up using my left arm.
There was a scream and it didn’t come from the trolley lady. Mark Twain once said something about profanity providing a release that prayer couldn’t. That being the case I released my pain into the atmosphere with a string of words that I never used again until the bungee jump. (but that’s another story).
When I had finished I was sweating, I walked to the side of the road and sat down next to the crying man. He couldn’t stop sobbing, there was no point asking him to get my ciggys out of my pocket .
I only had my right arm working and my ciggys and lighter were in the top right hand pocket of my jacket, the entrance to this pocket seemed to start just under my right armpit, so using my right arm in a tight leather bike jacket I started digging for nicotine.
The trolley lady started to shout " he’s having a fit" and I had to shout that I was ok and just wanted a smoke. I noticed the crawling traffic and the nosey motorists who were slowing down past the accident to look at the blood, then I realised the blood was mine so using my good arm I started to flick it at their cars in a large overhand gesture. The traffic speeded up for a while, but then everything stopped when the police arrived.

I have no real idea of timescales to this point, but I imagine it only being in the region of 5 minutes or so.
The local constabulary were on the scene pretty quickly and one of them came up to me and took my ciggy off me just before I lit it. "That will kill ya" he said I started to laugh, I found the whole thing farcical. "No" he said, " you been  in the petrol mate, if you light up, that'll kill ya" he was right, there was a strong smell of fuel. I was also wondering about the burning on my hands, but when I looked it wasn’t fire, I had pulled most of my fingernails out on both hands when trying to claw my way to a stop on the road. It hurt more on the right hand than the left, but the left arm was a strange shape anyway after I had leaned on it.
I suddenly felt like a child who had fell over in a park when there was no one around that I knew, the only person who might help me was wearing a blue uniform, I held up the bloody stumps on my fingers to show him "I cant get my helmet off, can you help me please" He carefully removed the helmet and then started to look around. Free of my helmet I started to look around too. My bike was about 50m further down the road. The second officer was dragging it to the side of the road, the front wheel of the bike was touching the back wheel, it looked absurd, I started to giggle again. "Have you been drinking" the officer asked. "No, just finished work" I said "I have to get to my girlfriends to finish her" I sparked up, it was all so unreal, it was like I was waiting for him to say, 'ok you can go now'.
The ambulance arrived, I stood up ready to go but the officer sat me down, "you will get the next one" he said, until that point it had never even occurred to me that someone else may have been hurt. The first ambulance took the driver of a transit van away. I wasn’t sure what was going on, I asked the officer what had happened. "That’s the driver of the van you went through" he said "You gave him a mild heart attack"
Me, how could I... I wasnt well and I was covered in blood, but no one seemed to be stopping me doing anything, there was a crowd, but they were only interested in watching me, I was the centre of attention, the chief puppet in the show. I kept looking at my fingers, I showed them to the crowd because I wanted to ask if anyone had a bandage but they turned away, then they started to walk away, there was so much blood. And without my audience I wasnt sure what to do. I walked to the back of the van and saw the small window that I had gone through, I noticed the hole in the glass windscreen on the front where I had come out the other side. The nice policeman came and sat me down again. "As you went through the van your bike went over the top" he said. "The two of you met up again on the other side, when it hit you it broke your arm" he looked me right in the eye and said "I have seen smaller accidents where we scrape the biker up, when I pulled up here I was looking for your body"

I started to giggle again,it was hard to stop and it all seemed so strange. The next ambulance came, "Anyone else before me" I quipped, but no, this was mine.
They put me in a wheelchair and got me into the ambulance, then while travelling they lay me on a trolley to wheel me out the other side. There seemed to be some fuss but I wasnt really sure what it was over. There was somthing new though, there were parts of me other than my fingers that were starting to hurt.
In hospital they asked my name and I told them, I couldn’t quite remember my full address, but I could remember my dads work phone number. They said that would do and wheeled me into a cubicle.

Comments

[Jason]

Wow!!! What happens next, what happens next!!!!!

[Sandy]

Oh my god, that's terrifying! What a story! I can't wait to hear the rest. I love the part where the woman says, "He's having a fit!" Hilarious. In a bloody-stumps-of-fingers sort of way.

Oh, and yes, in the U.S. donuts ARE made of “do.” It is pronounced the same as “dough,” but is twice as delicious and cures anorexia.