Notes on an Air Evac 6

Posted on June 11, 2004 in Hikes and Trails

OK, Jenny. Here it is. The last in the series.

As they lifted me into the chopper, I felt boredom, shame, and gratitude wash across my consciousness. By the time I got to Chapman Hospital, I was thanking everyone. I handed my wallet to the front desk so the cashier could take down my health insurance information. “I trust you,” I said as they wheeled me off into my cubicle.

Chapman’s ER was nothing like the ones I’d seen on television. There weren’t any of those big rooms that you shared with the old lady who was dramatically choking on a raisin or the child who’d they’d fished out of an ice cold lake after six hours. None of the physicians resembled George Cluny in the least. The walls were solid: there was no looking into the next chamber to see all the blood spouting out of the finger of the fool who’d nearly cut it off with a circular Skil saw.

They did the EKG before Lynn arrived. “Don’t put that thing on my wife,” I said when the tech hooked me up to his machine. “You’ll be keeping her overnight for observation.” He laughed and nodded, having seen this very scenario played out many times each week. Lynn arrived a few minutes later with the paramedics who handed over the paperwork to the front desk. The Burnsides made a special trip into the room. “You owe her,” he teased.

That I did and I nodded with a huge grin back.

Then came the hurry-up-and-wait as other patients flooded into the ER.

If you want to see a cross-section of human suffering and human folly, go to an ER on Memorial Day weekend. I’d been there once before, when I’d cut my finger with a sharp knife while cooking some years ago. I sat in the waiting room elevating my finger in the waiting room for two hours while more critical cases went before me. That time there were at least two other people who had similarly cut or punctured themselves while barbecuing.

Today seemed to be reserved for the foolhardy. There really was a fellow who nearly cut his finger off with a Skil saw. He’d been using it to portion out frozen hamburger. The doctor spent an hour pulling the sinews back in line, aligning the bone properly, and sewing it together. When he was finished, he pushed out a tray piled high with sopping red sterilized pads.

Because I was next to the nurse’s station, I heard about the other cases. There was the daredevil who’d attempted to ride his motorcycle down a staircase as he’d seen in the movies. The doctor suspected that he’d tried to go down the railing. This patient was a tall, half-naked, emaciated, goateed white boy who kept making trips to the bathroom with his friend. Scrapes and bruises capped the corners of his protruding bones. He gaped at me, the one tied to his bed by his saline bag, evidentally wondering what I was in for.

A little girl seemed less than perturbed by her need to have stitches. Her mother, however, was so hysterical, the staff had to send her out into the waiting room while they did their jobs. The father, on the other hand, sneaked off to the staff room and watched the Lakers game. The doctor on call offered him a cup of coffee to enjoy while they finished closing the daughter’s cut.

An older gentleman hung around the nurses’ station while they examined his wife. She’d done something to her toe. “I don’t think I broke it,” she kept telling the doctor. He checked the x-rays and discovered a crack right at the tip. It would take six weeks to heal, he said.

Just before I left, they brought in a bear of a man sprawling on a gurney. I am not sure what he’d done to himself — my guess is that he’d fallen, perhaps from a trail biker — but I could see that he’d been tossed and rolled. A nurse came to his side with a needle. “This is morphine,” she said. “For the pain.” She injected it straight into his IV.

I waited there, watching the slow drip of the IV, for three hours. They misplaced my papers for a time, but found them again and did some blood work. Lynn needed to go out into the waiting room where she sat with Shari, who’d come to pick us up.

When the results came back, Dr. Henderson came into the room. “You’re going to do it again,” he said. “You know what happened. You saw the peak. You thought you’d make it. In your enthusiasm, you neglected to watch your water. But I’m not going to tell you not to hike. Just take the rest of the night off and call us if you have a headache or throw up again.”

And that ended my sojourn in Chapman Hospital. The evening nurse yanked the needle out of my arm and walked me out “You’re our first heat exhaustion case of the season,” he beamed. I smirked and paid my bill while he told Lynn what to watch out for in the next twenty four hours.

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Shari drove us back to our truck, still parked outside the Maple Springs Visitors Center. The road ambled blindly through the dark canyon, past cabins and nightspots which were the main social life for residents of this incongruous rustic country town on the fringe of the Orange County elitist sprawl. When we approached a parking lot, we saw the flashing lights of a Sheriff’s truck. Just in time, I thought.

While Lynn went to the bathroom and then opened the truck to guzzle the still cool ice water we’d left stowed there in a thermos, I chatted with the deputy and an older fellow sitting in his car. “I’ll call off the tow truck,” he said, but I think he was kidding. He knew the Silverado Motorway and its dangers. He was impressed that I’d been air evaced. “It’s a tough trail,” he said. I vouched for that.

I tried to point out the route of the trail to Shari, but it was far too dark and the foothills far too close. So I evoked what stood behind the near mountains and explained how it jumped and jerked up three miles and 2000 feet to Bedford Peak.

As we packed up the last of our gear (except Lynn’s red backpack which had been left behind on the helicopter), the deputy finished his other conversation and jumped in his truck. “In six to seven months,” he called, “I’ll buy the book.”

“Oh you don’t have to wait that long,” I said. “I’m writing the story for my weblog.”

THE END

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The series:

1. The Silverado Motorway
   
2. Living by Contingencies
   
3. The Climb
   
4. Joel in Trouble
   
5. Help Arrives with an Airlift
   
6. The Emergency Room.