Surviving a Near-Fatal E-Bike Accident and the Road Back

 

 

The Accident 

On August 17 I was in a near-fatal e-bike accident that ruptured my large intestine.  I won’t go into details, but if things had gone just a little bit differently and I didn’t make it to a Level II trauma operating table in time, I would not be here writing about my experience.  

I will say that it is true that in a major event like this that time slows; that there seems to be plenty of time to correct what is obviously going wrong, but it still happens, so I was watching myself go through the air in slow motion and wondering why things were transpiring like they were.

The Surgery and the Tubes

The doctors went into surgery not knowing what they’d find. A quick CT scan showed my bowels leaking into my internal cavity, but they were not sure how bad the break was. If the leak were small, they could go in with a fiber optic and small robot arm.  If it were large, they couldn’t use the robot, and the surgeon had big hands. 

When I woke, I was told it was the worst-case scenario and I had a 6-inch vertical incision going up from about my belly button (like splicing a burst hose, they cut out two inches of intestine with the break, then sewed the two ends back together.  Plus as SOP, while in the area they went ahead and took out my healthy appendix as a precaution from going in again in the future).  And I found six tubes coming out of me: an IV (of course), a nasogastric (NG) tube going up my nose and down into my stomach draining bile (a torture I would not wish on anyone), a wound vac (to speed healing of the incision), a catheter (which thankfully came out before the general anesthetic wore completely off), and two Jackson-Pratt (JP) drains pulling fluid from deep inside where they repaired my intestine, with the tubes coming out of holes near my belly button and emptying into fist-size drains attached to my gown. 

I couldn’t move because of the six-inch incision down my midsection had cut my core muscles. I couldn’t eat because my bowels had shut down during surgery (a condition called ileus). And because opioids slow digestion, they limited the heavy painkillers. Restarting my bowels was the number one concern.

As I lay there in pain, unable to move or eat, my first thought was that dying would have been easier, at least for me, if not my family.

And although I was miserable, in pain, and helpless, I was also thankful to be alive.  If just a few things had happened differently, I would not be in that recovery room.  It might be called a near-death experience, but not in the sense that I was ever unconscious or saw a light, but in the realization that I was lucky to be alive, was thankful to God, and reminded we need cherish the life we live as it can be snuffed out in an instant in the most trivial of circumstances (as I saw in the news when I was recovering). I did a lot of praying those first days, asking God for strength to get me through.

 

The Candy Strip(p)er and the Morning Vampire

The next four days were a mix of pain and boot-camp. The nurses, drill-sergeants in scrubs, ordered me out of bed to walk the halls in hopes of jump-starting my intestines.  After two nurses lifted me out of bed, they would hand me over to a vivacious, chatty and pretty candy striper (if she were in a G-string I wouldn’t have noticed or cared in my state), and I would hobble down the hall, my IV stand and wound vac trailing me like a bridal train. 

And I found out then why tennis balls are on the bottom of walkers: I tried scootching the walker along, but the rubber feet kept sticking to the tile floor.  The Striper noted that if there were tennis balls on the end I could scootch it, but without them I would have to bring the stoppers off the floor. Try that with a six-inch incision through your core.

Adding additional misery, at 5am each morning the “vampire” nurse would visit, taking the daily blood draw to get the results in time for the 10am doctor rounds.  They moved the location of the blood draw each day so by the time I checked out I looked like a junky.

Most everyone else who was conscious in the trauma wing got breakfast shortly after the blood draw, but since I was still waiting for my bowels to restart and couldn't eat, the vampire visit would just lead to one of the staff sergeants ordering me to another lap around the wing with my pretty Striper, and I could smell bacon, eggs, and pancakes wafting through the halls, which would have made my stomach grumble if it were working (noticing my hunger the Striper cheerily recommend that that I not watch the Food Channel on the hospital TV until I was allowed to eat)

 

The Light and the End of the Tunnel

Finally my intestines restarted, so the NG tube was yanked out of my nose and I got a cup of apple juice, my first intake other than ice chips in five days.  It was like ambrosia hand-squeezed by the gods of Olympus themselves. The Jello I got an hour later was better than a $100 Wagyu ribeye from a steakhouse.

I was in the hospital another day as they kept an eye on me as they graduated my food from liquids to soft to solids rather quickly.  As everything seemed to be working I was sent home with a portable wound vac and one last JP tube emptying fluid from deep inside my stomach cavity, with a home nurse visiting three days a week

 

Recovery at Home

The wound vac (with its own special brand of pain during bandage changes) was cancelled two weeks later along with the removal of the last JP tube (the doctor just yanked it out: six inches of tubing came out of a hole near my belly button, bringing a new and strange sort of pain to the wide pantheon of pain I discovered and experienced the previous three weeks).

Today about five weeks after the ordeal I am still recovering, with my main incision still open.  They don’t “stitch” up large incisions anymore (news to me), they just leave them open and let them close on their own, one layer of skin cells at a time, using a wound vac the first few weeks to speed things along.  It will take another month or so for it to close completely, then it will start its long process of fading into a faint 6” scar over the course of a year.  It will be impressive, and my plan is to tell people it is from a knife fight I got into at an El Paso bar since “e-bike accident” doesn’t sound impressive outside of California.

 

What I Learned

So how has this experience changed me?  My first thought is a greater appreciation of the hospital system and staff.  I literally would not have made it using an “urgent care center”, or if the trauma center was out of driving range.  The staff (despite my joking) were dedicated, professional and caring, and they all went out of their way to make me more comfortable.

And like most everyone with serious accidents or near-death experiences, there is a special appreciation for the life I have and what is important: family, friends and faith.  “Work” and "career" never came up in my thought process during recovery, and if anything, this incident is allowing me to transition from semi-retired to full retirement without regret so I can focus on the things that really matter.