By: Tony Morgan

My mother asked me, very quietly, if I would consider not riding on March 17, St Patrick’s Day.  It seemed like one of those requests you agree to automatically, to make the asker happy, never really considering whether you intend to keep the “promise” or not.  Last year, on St. Patrick’s Day, by 2:30 in the afternoon, I was laying on the pavement, having just suffered my first serious motorcycle accident in twenty five years of riding, resulting  in the phone call my mother had been dreading ever since she came home from work to find her eight year old son sitting on her husband’s Honda  CM400.

What I didn’t find out until I was in my twenties was that that sight had prompted Mom to ask Dad to sell his bike, hopefully nipping her son’s suicidal interest in the bud.  That was a futile effort, however, as we were all to discover that riding a motorcycle was what I had been put here to do.  After owning more than one hundred and fifty motorcycles, logging more than 800000 total kilometres of riding mileage, I finally found myself lying on the pavement, unable to move, and wondering, somewhat legitimately, if this is what death was like.  I suspect all those who talk of “life passing before your eyes” business weren’t really all that seriously hurt, because I didn’t see any details of my life, I only saw what I may be going to miss – the future.

I had already done my “self checks” before anyone had even reached where I was laying, and discovered that I could move my head, arms, and left leg (with some difficulty), but there were serious issues with the right leg.  Passersby were reacting appropriately, encouraging me to lie still, and wait for assistance, but I was fairly calm, and had removed my helmet and jacket, and was proceeding to call my wife to give her the news.  The driver of the minivan that had T-boned me was absolutely hysterical, and I had the dubious honour of calming HER down at the scene, and politely asking her to please move away from me.   EMS were on the scene very quickly, and there was very little pain at this point, merely a bit of resistance to movement.  Your body not doing what is asked of it is a very peculiar sensation, but I had already looked at my right leg, over protestations from the EMS techs, and thought I had some understanding of what my injuries were.

After waiting in Emergency for nine hours for an operating room to open up, having gone for several X-rays and MRIs, the list was long and varied.  I had a cracked, and two chipped vertebrae, broken bones in both feet, numerous broken toes (which were to prove amongst the most painful!!!) , two separate breaks of the right femur, and the biggie – both my fibula and tibia were smashed into about five pieces each where the van’s bumper had crushed my leg against the engine of the bike.  My right foot had been rotated 180 degrees, and was bent back up my leg, so my toes were kind of touching the back of my knee.  I had been sedated after being in Emergency for a while to reposition the foot, as there was very little blood circulation past the break site, and the prognosis for the foot itself was grim, at best.  I didn’t tell my wife at the time, but the X-ray tech only gave me a fifty-fifty chance of keeping my leg past the knee.  As little as ten years ago, they wouldn’t have even tried to save the leg, the breaks were so bad.

The good news was that I had avoided any compound fractures, so no blood, and all the joints of the leg had escaped injury, giving a reduced recovery time, or so the thoughts went…  I went in for nearly six hours of surgery at 12:30 in the morning, and that was my last clear memory for nearly 48 hours.  Waking up in intensive care was the beginning of a crash course in the condition of health care in this province.  You see, I had reached my forty-first year of life without ever having to spend time in a hospital, and my first visit was becoming complex.  When my wife had shown up in Emergency the previous afternoon, the nurses were eager to get my insulin, as my blood sugar was over 25 mgs/l at the time of admission.  Problem was, I don’t have any insulin, as I was unaware that I was diabetic.  Now, all of a sudden, I was dealing with two major health issues at the same time.  The diabetes thing turned out to be my silver lining – rather than lie in bed (cause that’s all I could do) and slip into a depression about what had happened, I could see the accident as adding as much as ten years onto the end of my life, having the diabetes discovered before showing symptoms.  This optimistic outlook was to become rarer and rarer as time passed, but I could cling to it in the beginning, at least.

I managed to escape infection, which is definitely the single biggest concern of the post-operative patient, and was fairly successfully balancing the conflicting demands of two doctors, a diabetic one, and my surgeon.  The surgeon couldn’t care less about the diabetes, ordering me to eat carbs, sugars, proteins, and calcium, with the diabetic doctor poo-pooing all that, and telling me I have to start the process of choosing my foods for the rest of my life, from the standpoint of a diabetic.  The long story of the recovery would easily take chapters, so suffice it to say that bone growth amongst pieces with up to 25 millimeters of displacement in a 41 year old isn’t a quick process.  I was completely non weight-bearing for a full seven months after the accident, which had me in a wheelchair at home, eventually graduating to crutches.  The good news was that the worst injuries took so long to heal, that all the minor ones were allowed to heal fully, without having too much strain put on them too early, which is the most common problem in recovery.

Ten weeks after the accident, having gained a significant improvement in my crutch handling abilities, my wife purchased a Ural Patrol 2wd with sidecar as part of my “therapy”.  We had considered a bone-regeneration machine available to professional athletes with similar injuries to mine, but it was very expensive, and although the machine could be used indefinitely, at least until there was some sort of electronic problem, the machine is programmed to work only as much as you purchase.  Therefore, after the pre-determined (pre-paid) 600 exposures, the five thousand dollar machine simply stops working (although it is still perfectly functional), and there is no way to turn the machine back in for any kind of credit, or re-programming – it is simply garbage.  Having both a practical and moral objection to this particular kind of thievery, I opted for the therapy that would have a residual value – the Ural.

The Ural will easily take up another complete article by itself, but as I find myself exactly one year to the day since the accident, I am surprised how difficult it has been to put some of these things into words, in many cases, for the first time since the accident.  I could easily have gone on a long political rampage about health care in this province, because I was one of the ignorant masses who had no idea what was happening to our health care.  Suffice it to say that anyone who has spent any time in a hospital in the last five years who still thinks the auto manufacturers deserved the money they got is simply 100% wrong.  Everyone who works in the health care profession in this province who has not been pounded down by decades of mismanagement , overspending and incompetence absolutely deserves to wear a red cape to work because you are all heroes.

I truly hope this has not been a negative introduction to me, but this incident has certainly occupied most of my life for the last twelve months, and I felt I needed to put some words on (virtual) paper to see how I felt about things.  I harbour no ill will towards the driver of the minivan who hit me (who turned out to be a neighbour!!), I thank my gear for saving me (my Canadian military surplus boots almost certainly kept my leg on during the impact), and I now have seen target fixation at it’s absolute worst, as well as give more credence to the thought that car drivers really do not know what to do when the motorcycles first start to come out in the spring.  Be extra careful for the first couple of dozen rides in the spring, or wait a little longer to get that first ride in, because regardless of who is at fault, the minivan ALWAYS wins.

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