OneAndOneIs2

I've been in more that my share of road accidents, if I'm honest. I started out being a passenger in a minibus that went around a corner and fell over, overbalanced perhaps by the stack of scuba cylinders in the back that started hissing ominously as we tried to get the doors open.

I moved onto being run off the road in a Renault 19, when some idiot coming the other way decided to try and overtake somebody else going the other way. I would have been alright just going onto the grassy verge if there hadn't been a road sign in the way. In swerving to avoid the sign that was there for my safety, I went into a ditch and headlong into a tree. The sunroof exploded above me and cut the inside of my ear deeply enough to need stitches. Except they couldn't get a needle inside my ear, so they poured glue in and told me to stay dry for a week. So not really my fault - even the police account in the local paper agreed with that.

The Peugeot 406 *was* my fault, I admit.. it was too big a car for the narrow country road. But it was a horrible car to drive and to be honest I felt a certain amount of relief as I put it through the barb-wire fence.

The Corsa wasn't really my fault: I was going ridiculously slowly around a motorway bend when it lost grip and bounced off a kerb. I kept it going for nearly a year, so it wasn't really a big incident. I'm fairly sure there was oil on the road - it had no business losing grip at the speed I was doing.

And then this year of course I came off my motorbike courtesy of the black ice. It happened very quickly but I can clearly recall numerous aspects of the crash: My head slamming into the road, causing me to think "Sod it, now I need a new helmet"; my shoulder going 'crack' causing me to swear quite a lot; and thumping into the grassy verge with my leg wedged under the bike, causing me to swear some more until some helpful bystanders lifted the thing off me so I could finally get up.

So. As Tina helpfully drove me back from the dentist on Wednesday morning, half a mile up from where I wrote off the Peugeot, we rounded a corner and her BMW Mini Cooper lurched a bit. And I thought "That's bad". And as she fought to regain control and lost, I thought "Here we go again" and we went into a spin. And then I saw a large sturdy tree coming right for me, and I closed my eyes, thought "I hope I don't die" and waited for it to be over.

There was an almighty bang, and it was over. I opened my eyes again.

This wasn't immediately helpful, my vision was really not good. There were three reasons for this: The car was full of smoke; my glasses had shattered; and I had quite a lot of blood in my eyes. I was just about able to see that both airbags had deployed, and mine was covered in a rather fetching red splatter pattern.

So, not a promising start, really. That's the trouble with hitting a tree: The damn things just don't move. Or bend. Or have any crumple zones to speak of.

I was interested to notice that I was swearing nonstop despite the fact that I badly wanted to breathe in. My mouth appeared to have short-circuited from my brain and was just busy doing its own thing. It took me a few moments to regain control, take a deep breath, and tell Tina, who was somewhat panicked at all the blood I was leaking, to get out of the car before another car came around the corner and ploughed into us.

She did so, and I attempted to do the same. I was foiled in this by three things: My left arm was aching with pins and needles and wouldn't move; the door handle had fallen off; and the door was wedged immovably in place. I gave up and stayed where I was. A car did come around the corner, but it stopped in time. That was helpful. Tina was still having hysterics thinking she'd killed me, but my hard-won experience at getting injured in car crashes came to my aid and I was able to convince her I was fine.

Helpful bystanders began to appear thick & fast at that point, and we soon ascertained that the door really would not open. The Mini being convertible, we tried the electric roof, which helpfully still worked. The smoke cleared as soon as it was down, and I regained some more vision and the ability to breathe (relatively) easily. However, when I tried to move, my entire torso, and particularly my lower back, hurt so much that, yet again, I gave up and stayed put. One of the more well-prepared bystanders stuck a bandage on my head to stop the blood coming out of it, wiped some of the spillage out of my eye, and put a space blanket on me.

Tina reappeared to check I still hadn't died. Luckily, I hadn't. I remembered that photos of an accident are important things to have, so I suggested that if her iPhone had survived, she should take some pictures for insurance purposes, and not so we could put them on Facebook later at all. If you don't like the sight of blood, this is probably a good place to stop reading...

--->

That's me. And this is the car:

I was, you can just about see, still *in* the car when this photo was taken. If you're observant and remember that in England we drive on the correct side of the road, you'll also notice the car is facing the wrong way.

The EMS guys had a lot of trouble finding us - there was a helicopter overhead at one point - and it was the fire engine that was first on the scene, about half an hour after the crash. They immobilized my neck, asked all the usual questions (what's your name, how old are you, can you feel your legs, etc), and dug out the really cool power tools to force the door open. This was harder than expected. But in the end they managed it.

Some time later, the ambulance and police arrived and I could finally be moved. Because my back (and neck. And hips. And arm) were still in real pain, I couldn't just get out: I was lifted up onto a board, which was swung over the back of the car and within minutes I was strapped immobile into an ambulance bed. And off we went to hospital. The same hospital, as it happens, that I was taken too after I came off my bike. Not really a place I had hoped to return to, but a considerably more dramatic entrance this time.

To my considerable relief, I was finally unstrapped from the board and allowed to lay on a bed. Which had padding, a real relief to the back of my head, believe me. A rather pretty nurse wiped some of the blood off me, cut my t-shirt off me and binned it, and stuck a new dressing on my head. A doctor came and checked my spine over. It wasn't broken. So that was nice.

My left thumb, however, wasn't so lucky. Some hours later, the NHS not being noted for its high speed service, X-rays confirmed it to be fractured. Some four hours after my arrival at hospital, I was finally able to get off my bed. Because, courtesy of the bag of saline they'd plumbed into my arm, I was bursting for a pee. With a lot of wincing and some cursing, I got upright and then hobbled at a painfully slow speed across the corridor.

Naturally, having been waiting fruitlessly for a doctor to turn up for the last hour, she appeared as soon as I closed the toilet door behind me. But when you've gotta go..

I came back out after taking an embarrassingly long time to put my trousers back on, and went into an examination room for the doctor to go over my case.

She checked over my torso and confirmed that it was indeed bruised all over but not actually broken, looked at my swollen and discoloured thumb and told me that it needed to be X-rayed.

I told the silly mare it had already been x-rayed, and she went back through my notes until she found the x-rays and confirmed I had fractured it. She made a note that I'd need to go to a fracture clinic for follow-up on that, and proceeded to write that i had no spinal damage or head injuries.

At this point I bit my tongue to prevent my first comment from going out, and politely pointed out the large white bandage on my forehead that was being held in place by my own blood. The daft cow then amended her notes to read "no head TRAUMA" before packing me off to a nurse to deal with the simple matter of cleaning the cut and putting some tape over it. She then called in a nurse to help her save her notes to the computer, and buggered off home.

If you haven't guessed, I have a rather low opinion of that woman's professional ability. Luckily, the nurse that eventually turned up to deal with my forehead was actually competent, which was rather fortunate. She left her trainee to clean the blood out of my cut whilst she went to get the paraphernalia she would need to remove the plumbing from my arm. On returning, the trainee expressed her concern that the bump on my head was rather large for an allegedly-simple cut. They tried to have a conversation in medical jargon about it to avoid worrying me, but discussing whether something might be oedematous or a haematoma was never going to keep a biochemistry graduate with eight years clinical experience from understanding that they weren't sure if the bump was due to swelling or a blood clot.

I interrupted them at this point to explain that I was about to faint, and they broke off the discussion and helped my lay down. They asked if it was the pain or the sight of blood that was the problem, but I pointed out that it was now six in the evening and I had had nothing to eat since 8am. The trainee nurse was sent off on a hunt for some biscuits, which helped.

They then decided to dig deeper, and I mean that in the literal sense: They started poking into the cut with forceps (Big medical tweezers) . They didn't like what they found, so they called in a more senior nurse who agreed with them, said some unkind words about the doctor, and jabbed a needle into my head.

Luckily, the local anaesthetic it delivered soon went to work and they dug even deeper with an even larger pair of forceps. Some rather larger blood clots came out, followed by a number of chunks of car window glass. Followed, unsurprisingly, by rather a lot of fresh blood. Fortunately, by this time Tina had re-found me and I'd fortified my two digestive biscuits with the bag of crisps she'd brought, so the loss of yet more of the red stuff wasn't too big a problem. The nurse poked around a bit more, confirmed that all the glass was gone, and then decided that, what with one thing and another, the cut couldn't just be dealt with by sticking plaster, and called her superior back over to stitch it up.

This would have been less of a problem if the anaesthetic hadn't been wearing off by then. A helpful family trait I inherited from my mother is a high resistance to painkillers. My brother recently discovered that even morphine doesn't work. So I might have cursed a bit more at this point, but I kept it largely under my breath. Seven stitches later, my head was all sewn up and neatly dressed. At somewhat after seven in the evening, we were finally able to leave the hospital.

Slowly.

Tina had nothing broken but was bruised and aching all over. I had all that, and broken bones, blood loss, and the promise of a lovely new scar on my forehead to look forward to as well. On the plus side, my skull had proven to be tougher than the car window, a fact that will surprise nobody who knows me.

Tina's parents, who had been planning on having dinner with us that evening to celebrate her father's birthday, instead drove us carefully home from the hospital.

Ever since, I've been reliving the good old days of earlier this year, i.e. hobbling around the house with only one good hand and groaning every time I sit down. Or stand up. Or laugh. Or cough. Or hiccup. Only this time, I don't have an able-bodied housemate, because she's even more purple than I am.

The car is a write-off, but it did well in allowing us to walk (slowly and painfully, it's true, but nevertheless able to get upright and put one foot in front of the other) away from a fairly unpleasant collision with a tree. As for the cause of the accident: Some bastard had spilled a large amount of oil or diesel over the already-wet road. The EMS people were having difficulty walking around on it, so as soon as the car lost grip there was never any chance of regaining control - that stuff is like ice.

I've taken the end of the week off work (Tina was on holiday already) since I can't type very well, can't see very well, and can't sit upright for very long. I'll be unable to actually go back to work until I can get some new glasses made, since I can't legally drive without them. And Tina has been round to our favourite car dealer to ask about how quickly she can get hold of a new car since she's due back at work on Monday.

So.. how was YOUR week?