smashing
……I have a headache, and I don’t feel like writing, but I’ll hunt and peck anyway. Sunday evening, as I rode my motorcycle toward home, another small motorbike collided with mine, almost head-on. I seem to have been thrown sideways, or I vaulted over my handlebars, breaking off the left mirror with my shoulder. I haven’t talked to a witness, I don’t have a video record of the incident, and I was knocked unconscious.
……I apparently landed on a curb with the right side of my helmet and my body and my spine. I don’t know what happened. After a few minutes I reawakened with a horrible throbbing headache, and I was ‘dazed and confused.’ I didn’t know immediately how I came to be seated on a brick sidewalk, my right side scraped and bruised and caked with dark mud from the gutter. I was really loopy. I had my bell rung like Oscar de la Hoya beaten by Manny Pacquiao. I could tell you who I was and where I was. I remembered that I was on my way home. But I couldn’t remember the accident. I was swooning; I really wanted to lie down on the sidewalk. I was dizzy and my back hurt so much. But the man who was helping me to sit upright on the sidewalk wouldn’t let me lie down.
my bike before the accident
……I looked around at the crowd of bystanders, I saw my bike standing on its flipstand and my damaged, muddy helmet propped on the right mirror. I saw a beige van labeled ‘Hospital Pulau Pinang’ depart, and I was told that the other motorcyclist was in it. Someone asked if I wanted to go to a private hospital. I didn’t know what to say. Someone asked what should be done with my motorcycle. I didn’t know what to say. I had been knocked senseless, and I really only wanted to lie down. Someone handed to me the left mirror, stalk and mount that had been broken off the bike. Another man handed to me my scratched and muddy wristwatch with a now-twisted metal bracelet.
Another beige Toyota van arrived, and I was helped to my feet and to the gurney. I was happy to be horizontal. Soon thereafter I was taken into the emergency ward of Hospital Pulau Pinang. The place seemed small and crowded. No one checked my blood pressure, pulse, respiration rate, pulse-oxygen level, my pupils, mouth, ears … Someone removed mud from my arm and leg and cleaned the road rashes. Someone took the driver license that I said was in my pocket in order to start a treatment record with my identification.
After being questioned about my pains I was taken to the radiology department for x-ray films of the reported painful areas of my anatomy. I was taken back to the emergency ward and had to tell more people (nurses? medical students? interns?) what had happened to me (why I was lying in the E.D.) and where I have pains. Someone eventually asked if I had blurred vision, double vision, nausea or vomiting (I had none). When someone heard that I’d lost consciousness for minutes, I was shuttled back to the radiology clinic for x-ray imaging of my noggin.
No one would give me pain medicine, so I was alert and able to talk to every inquisitor, so I seemingly didn’t have any brain injury beyond bruising from concussion. But a physician wanted me to be admitted to the hospital for ongoing observation in case I developed bleeding in my cranium or blood clots in my body or brain. I didn’t object. My back hurt, my neck hurt, my ribs hurt, my shoulders hurt, a knee hurt, and I thought that I was seriously injured. No one reviewed the x-ray films with me, though. The employees took ‘forever’ to move me from the E.D. to the multi-care ward C10 for an overnight stay.
A nurse or patient care tech set on the bedside table an extra-extra-large set of brown cotton trousers and an extra-extra-large brown shirt. I was so sore, I didn’t want to move a muscle, I expected that a nurse would come to give to me a pain-reliever and to help me remove my muddy clothes and don some normal-size hospital-issue duds.
After a while someone came to start an intravenous drip of .9% sodium chloride in water and to place a pulse-oxygen monitor on a fingertip. She told me that X-X-L was the only size clothing available. Hard to believe in an Asian country where many men and women are small. I’d guess that the hospital would have very few or none extra-extra-large clothes. These would fit W.C. Fields. Ridiculous.
After a while I was quite tired of hearing the pulse monitor beeping, and I thought that the gentleman in the bed beside it probably would rather sleep than hear it any more. When a white-clad employee passed within my peripheral vision as I lay facing the ceiling, I waved her to me and asked how long I must have this device attached to me and beeping. She said all night. When I said that we wanted to sleep rather than listen to this, she said that she’d check. Minutes later, she came and removed it. It had been measuring my blood’s oxygen saturation for over half an hour. My level was 89%. Eventually, maybe an hour afterward, a woman came to put a nasal cannula in my nose to feed oxygen to me.
A physician told me hours later, the following morning, that a rib was cracked, it contributed to my chest pain, likely caused me to breathe shallowly and take in too little air and insufficiently oxygenate my blood. I had perceived that I was breathing shallowly, and I had heard employees talking of S.O.B (shortness of breath) since I was triaged in the Emergency Department. But I wasn’t concerned. I was primarily concerned with pain relief and wondered for hours since entering the hospital when someone would administer an analgesic. I had wished several times to pass out.
I wanted pain relief and sleep. I was done with testing and interviewing and had been admitted for overnight observation, so … couldn’t I have a pain-reliever, perhaps one with a sedative side-effect? When I could wave with my usable arm to another white-uniformed woman within visual range, I asked for pain medicine. She left then returned to inject something into my intravenous line. I asked what it was, but she wouldn’t tell me. It hurt when it entered my hand and my blood stream, so I surmised that it was something other than a saline placebo.
Eventually some pains subsided and I could wiggle a little on my bed to reposition my aching body and try to get comfortable. I pulled the pillow which someone had placed under my painful head and neck and I wedged it under my knees to hold up my legs. I didn’t want my whip-lashed neck and my head to be pushed forward that night, and I did want my legs to be elevated to tilt my pelvis and spine. I had no articulating bed like those in U.S. hospitals, so neither I nor a nurse could raise my legs. All I could do was double-over the pillow and place it under my knees and calves. That wasn’t easy with my limited mobility – only one useful arm – and pains. I wished that a nurse or patient care tech would assist me, as in U.S. hospitals.
I don’t think that any patient care technicians/certified nursing assistants are here; I think that all the similarly-uniformed women in sight were nurses. I can tell you that they didn’t care to nurse patients – not me or those on either side of me. We had no nurse-call buttons to use to alert anyone to our needs, and nurses didn’t check on our welfare or vital signs every half hour. They may be in the patient-care business, but they didn’t care. Apparently they only leave the nurses’ stations when ordered by a charge nurse or physician to connect a machine or administer a drug or oxygen. They do not circulate among assigned patients to see if our I.V. drips have emptied (ours had) or if we have pain or discomfort or difficulty breathing or need to go to a restroom or need a bottle to urinate into or…
Only when they hear someone coughing-up a lung or calling “nurse!” do they leave their chairs to tend to patients. But some of us, like me and the guys on my left and right, were too weak to shout “nurse.” I couldn’t wave an arm to gain attention, as a curtain had been halfway-pulled between me and the guy on my right, blocking the nurses’ station’s view of me! Hour after hour, throughout the sleepless night, when I’d hear footsteps and see in my peripheral vision someone walking, I’d wave, yet no one would come to me. Four times, as two walked to and from their nurses’ lounge, I could see the white nurse hats pinned atop their hairdos, so I know that they were nurses, not janitors or patients. Yet they wouldn’t respond to me waving seven feet away! Did they think that I was waving hello?
Due to fatigue, chest pain and shallow breathing, I couldn’t shout “nurse” or “perawat.” And the old men on both sides of me apparently couldn’t raise their voices, either. So we were ignored hour after hour as the nurses enjoyed conversation and laughing and songs from Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, Dion Warwick, Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. Care for patients? Nurse patients? On the overnight shift? That’s crazy!
In this medical/surgical ward, C10, we weren’t connected to any electronic monitors of pulse, blood pressure, temperature, blood oxygen or anything (Machines cost money!). We had no call buttons (They cost money!). And nurses would not check their assigned patients in twenty-minute or thirty-minute intervals. So any of us could have a seizure or myocardial infarction or die, and the nurses wouldn’t know. I was half-behind a curtain, thinking that a blood clot could travel to my heart or to my brain and kill me and no one would know anytime soon. They do not check patients at intervals. If the man on my left were having a seizure or something, I couldn’t alert anyone, because I didn’t have a call button or a voice to raise.
- to be continued -
