SUNDAY STORYTIME - 03.10.24

The Canada Goose Incident

[Sunday Storytime is an occasional departure from my weekday commentaries on politics and modern life. Often, it will be pure fiction, designed to escape the real world I talk about during the week. This week, however, it happens to be a true story. I hope you enjoy.]

“I’m looking pretty good!” I say to no one. The image looking back at me in the mirror is, of course, me. There I am, in a skintight bicycle racing suit. For a 60-year-old guy, I am cutting a pretty good figure in that suit. Not to brag, but, the body could pass for forties. All thanks, obviously, to a lot of bicycling along with an all-around fairly healthy lifestyle. Well, okay, there were the multiple near-misses in my life, a bit too much food and booze, and a million other stories of wear and tear on the old frame. But, considering I really have no business still being alive, the physique looking back at me isn’t half bad.

So it was, that I set out on my daily bicycle ride. At this point, the ride consists of a 17-mile trail known as The Loop that runs around the entire perimeter of Arlington, Virginia. If I’m off work and the weather is good, I will sometimes do the entire loop twice. On this day, the double is a distinct possibility. My entry is at about the westernmost point of the trail. From here, I will scale some significant hills before riding along the northern edge of the city. Once I reach the area known as Rosslyn, the trail descends a few hundred feet and leads into a park running along the western bank of the Potomac River.

I hit a new speed on one of the downhill sections this day. My bike, a Trek Madone 4.2 that would be the envy of any professional racer, is solid and true. Her lightweight, hand-laid carbon fiber frame is perfect and awe-inspiring. The sun is shining, the air is cool, the sweat is wicking away, and my smile is as wide as my face.

For a couple of miles, the trail runs along the Potomac River, squeezing between its western bank and the massive Pentagon with the expansive parking lots that lie around it. I maintain a perfect rhythm with the bike. My cadence on the pedals is running a steady 90 rpms, my breathing is relaxed and rhythmical, and my eyes are taking in the stunning views of the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Capitol. To say I am happy would not do the moment justice. Euphoric! Yeah, that’s more like it. I am euphoric.

The trail, nicely paved and always well maintained, dips down under the Fourteenth Street Bridges, a multi-bridge, multi-lane monstrosity that vibrates with the pounding rhythm of the constant flow of traffic over it, topped off with the percussive effect of the Metro Rail track that clings beside it. It is the main artery between Washington, D.C. and the suburbs of Northern Virginia. All sunlight fails to penetrate the darkness beneath the incredibly wide bridges, even on the brightest of days.

Naturally, on this beautifully sunny day, I have to reach up to my face to pull my sunglasses down a bit, lest I blindly run into some poor fella jogging down here. (Why anyone would run is beyond me.) There is also a good chance of water puddles or at least slimy mud. Maneuvering in an environment like this means I am naturally going to slow down a good bit. Plus, as I ride out from under the bridge on its southern edge, I enter a park known as Gravelly Point. It’s a strip of land that lies at the north end of the main runway for National Airport. The park is always full of people watching airplanes, jogging (there it is again), picnicking, and any kind of outdoor sport or game you can think of. Because this is a high-traffic area, a slow-going pace, well below what I have been doing for quite some time now, is warranted. Besides, in the interest of energy preservation, it’s time to slack off the pedals a bit. I’m more than halfway through the first loop and I have decided that this will indeed be a double loop day.

To my left is the Potomac River, a bold waterway befitting a city the stature of the capitol of the free world. Straight ahead of me is the National Airport main runway. Airplanes are landing from the North on this day, which means that as I ride through Gravelly Point facing southward, they roar overhead from behind me less than a hundred feet off the ground.

As a bicyclist, one always tries to ride under a sight like that without looking up at it. Warning: You’re going to look. The split-second I take my attention away from the bike trail to look up at the flying machine overhead is the very moment my day goes sour.

Before looking up at the plane, I had seen a couple and their young child about fifteen feet to the right of the bike trail. There was a row of bushes between me and them, so I had no idea what they were doing and, frankly, didn’t care. They were far enough away from the trail that they posed no danger to me, nor I to them. So, I looked up at the airplane and then back to the trail.

That’s when I saw the Canada Goose.

The couple, it turns out, had brought their young child to the park to throw seeds at a gaggle of Canada Geese. These birds have figured out they can save a whole lot of flying if they blow off that annual migration thing and just hang out in the park year-around, where there are all kinds of people as happy as can be to feed them. It is a lazy bird’s paradise.

The child apparently decides that it isn’t enough to just throw seeds at the geese. He chooses to throw the seeds past the geese, to make them run for their lunch. The problem for me is that the seeds also fly over the bike trail. When the oversized birds (they have a wingspan of as much as 75 inches and can weigh up to ten pounds) appear from behind the bush and begin to waddle across the bike trail just a few feet in front of me, I have nowhere to go.

I immediately grab two handfuls of brake lever and do everything I can to stop on a dime. In fact, I do come to a stop within just a few feet. But I am six inches past where I needed to stop in order to avoid the collision.

The mom screams. The child laughs. I gasp. My front tire broadsides a goose, and I hear it’s bones crunching under the impact.

Then, as far as I remember, nothing happens. There is no more information I can relate to you, regarding the crash. The next moment does not exist in my memory. In fact, a somewhat significant period of time does not exist for me.

“The ambulance is on the way,” the out-of-focus face is saying (through the echo chamber of someone who is just regaining consciousness) as it peers down at me from the direction of my left temple. I now realize I’m looking straight up at the sky and this guy is looking down at me from my ten o’clock position.

At my four o’clock is another face. “I have your phone,” it is saying to me. “Do you want to call anyone?”

Call anyone? Who would I call? What would I tell them? I have no idea what has happened and what is now going on. That’s what I am thinking, but the lines are down between my brain and my mouth at the moment. Nothing intelligible comes out.

“You’ve been in a bicycle accident. Buddy, are you okay?” This guy is at my seven o’clock.

“I have your bike,” comes a voice from my two. “I’ll make sure you get it back. I’m a Marine and a bicyclist. I work over there at the Pentagon. Trust me, man. Your bike is safe.”

Bike. Pentagon. Gravelly Point. Airplane overhead. Goose. A freaking goose! Pain. Oh, crap. This ain’t good. I try to sit up and realize that the lower half of my body is not responding properly. In fact, not at all.

“Don’t move. Stay right where you are,” Four O’clock says.

“The ambulance is coming from National Airport,” Ten O’clock says. “They should be here in a couple of minutes.”

There is a moment in a cataclysmic event like this where you realize you are helpless. You cannot think clearly. You cannot physically move. You are powerless to do anything. It is the moment when you realize that your very essence has been placed in the hands of strangers who you will likely never see again. They can rob you blind. They can pretend they didn’t see a thing and walk away. Or they can do the right thing, no matter how inconvenient it may be to their day. Ten, Four, Seven and Two all chose to do The Right Thing.

As awareness begins to creep back into my world, I can think of only one thing to say. I look at Ten O’clock and ask, “Did I at least kill that goose?”

“You want a painkiller?” It isn’t the first question the Emergency Medical Technician asks me, but it’s the first one I remember. The team has just rolled the stretcher into the back of the ambulance and he is the first of two EMT’s that will ride to the hospital in back with me.

“No, I’m okay. For now,” I bravely say. I suppose it was due to a good dose of shock, but I wasn’t in much pain at all, as long as I didn’t try to move my left leg. “My phone. Somebody has my phone.”

“Yeah. Here,” Four O’clock says as he hands the phone to the EMT alongside me. The doors of the ambulance have not yet been closed and all of my hourly guys are peering in. They are no longer positioned on the dial for me, so I don’t know who is who. But Two O’clock, the Marine who has my bike, hands a small square of paper to the EMT.

“This is my card with my name and phone number on it, along with my office number at the Pentagon,” he says with military certainty and efficiency. He looks at me and says, “I’ll take good care of your bike. I know that’s an expensive one, brother. When you get out of the hospital, give me a call and I’ll get it back to you.”

“Do you want to call someone now?” The EMT has just closed the ambulance doors and turns back to me with that question. He hands me the phone, and I push the speed dial to call my wife.

“Hello. This is Carmen. I can’t come to the phone right now, but please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Bye-bye!” The message had been recorded in her cheery way, filtered through her potent and beautiful accent she formulated in early life growing up in Santiago, Chile. Having lived for more than three decades in the U.S., her command of English is better than at least half of North Americans. But the accent is a nearly musical delivery, sometimes making me wonder if I have stepped onto the stage of a Broadway show.

Carmen is a world-class ballerina. Her career on stages all over the world happened a while ago. Her forte now is teaching ballet in a local conservatory, using her extensive knowledge and expertise to train thousands of young dancers. They will come away, not only with an appreciation of the arts, but skills of patience and perseverance that will serve them well in the future, whether they become professional dancers or not.

It is the middle of one of her classes when I call. I know this, and I do not expect her to pick up. But, I figure, I should leave a message so she knows what’s going on. “Hi, Boo. It’s me. Everything is okay, and I’m okay. But I had an accident on the bicycle. I’m in an ambulance right now going to a hospital. Don’t panic. I’m okay.”

At this moment, about five miles away from where I am currently laying in an ambulance, Carmen glances at her phone as her dance students are doing their best to emulate her flawless technique, and she sees the face of her phone light up. She never interrupts class to take a phone call. But something tells her this is a message she needs to listen to.

“I have to break a little early,” she tells the girls in her class after hearing my message. It has been a particularly tough session and they’re more than happy to call it a day. “I have a family emergency.” She immediately hits the call back button.

“Hi, Sweetie. I’m okay,” I say to her. I probably didn’t sound okay. “They’re taking me to the hospital to get checked out.”

“What hospital?” She says. “You should go to Virginia Hospital Center.” She had taken our daughters there throughout their lives and trusts the place.

“What hospital are we going to?” I asked the EMT.

“Virginia Hospital Center,” he responds. “Do you want to go somewhere else?”

“No that’s good,” Carmen shouts into the phone loud enough for the EMT to hear. “I’m on my way.”

“You’re at work,” I say. “You don’t have to come right away.” At this point, I really have no idea how badly I am injured.

“I’m on my way,” she repeats with enough structure to her words that I know I’m not going to win any debate with her at this moment.

Pain is awakening in my body as I’m rolled into the hospital. The EMT rattles off a list of my injuries and vitals to the nurse and waits for her to tell him which emergency room to wheel me into.

“We’re backed up,” the Admitting Nurse says to the EMT. “He’s going to to have to go to the waiting room. Put him in a wheelchair."

“You don’t understand,” the EMT says firmly. “This is an emergency case. He needs care now.”

“I said put him in a wheelchair,” Nurse Ratched shoots back.

“He can’t move,” the EMT protests.

“I don’t care,” the dark angel in the white dress snaps. “You can take him out of here if you want, but in here he has to go in a wheelchair in the waiting room.”

The pain in my left leg has awakened, and it is only with extreme agony that I am able to assist the EMT’s as they try to gently move me into a wheelchair. Not just any wheelchair. Our favorite nurse has picked out a nearly antique chair with a cushion-less, solid plastic seat!

I am wheeled out to a waiting room filled with several dozen other people who have come before me as Carmen rushes in from the parking lot. I sit in this hard wheelchair with now agonizingly shooting aches and pains developing at the top of my left left…a leg which I cannot move at all. Also, my shoulder is barking like a junkyard dog left out in the rain. I have broken that collar bone before, and I’m pretty sure I’ve done it again.

Remember now, that I refused painkillers in the ambulance, and obviously my favorite nurse at the desk isn’t going to offer anything. I am beginning to moan as waves of near blackout pain wash over me.

Fifteen minutes in, Carmen has had enough. She goes to the Admitting Nurse desk and has an argument with the dark angel about getting me into a room. “You’ll have to wait your turn,” the cold, heartless waste of human flesh shoots back. Carmen waits ten minutes, then goes back again. Again, she is shot down.

Finally, someone comes out for me. But, it turns out, I’m still not going into an emergency room. I am wheeled into some kind of room where a technician asks me stupid questions like, “On a one to ten scale, where is your pain right now?”

“Compared to what?” I ask incredulously. “I’m not familiar with the Joseph Mengele pain scale.” The answer is not well received, and I’m promptly wheeled back out to the waiting room where Carmen is stunned to see me.

“That was some kind of insurance thing, I think. The only thing they really did was assess whether I was having a heart attack,” is about all I can get out through waves of nauseating pain.

At about the forty-five minute mark of waiting in the stiff plastic wheelchair, I have had all I can take. The pain is constant and larger than life. Then we watch as the nurse ushers a woman with a snot-nosed kid into the emergency room. Aw, poor baby has a cold. That’s w-a-a-a-y more important than my crippled body.

Carmen is firm in situations like this, but her inherent niceness still shines through. The life I have lived has taught me a different, though no less valid, lesson. We are actually a well-balanced power-sharing duo in situations like this.

“Wheel me up to the desk,” I say to her. She looks at me and knows that Mount Gary is about to spew hot lava. Is that a quashed smile trying to ripple across her face? She stands up and rolls me right in front of Nurse Wilkes.

“I am in a lot of pain,” I say loudly enough to irritate her. She looks at me and opens her mouth to begin saying something. I do not give her the courtesy. “I am in a lot of pain and I am seriously injured.” My decibel level rises slightly with each word, and heads are beginning to turn. Then I finish with a sound level approaching a riding lawnmower by saying, “I AM IN A LOT OF PAIN!”

Within thirty seconds, several nurses and orderlies lift me up from the wheelchair and place me on an exam table, taking great pains not to move my left hip and leg from their position of basically forming an isosceles triangle with my knee at the top. I can’t move any of that skeletal structure.

I also can’t move my head. The EMT’s in the ambulance had put a collar on my head and neck, but when the wonderful Nurse of Death insisted that I be placed in a mobile torture unit on wheels, they had no choice but to remove the collar. Upon my being wheeled into an emergency room stall, a new total head restraint system was clamped on me.

“I’m Doctor Craig Hansen,” the younger-looking guy at my five says to me as he looks at my lower half. I have absolutely no idea what it looks like and no one will ever tell me. “Can you tell me what happened?”

In the more than one hour that has transpired since the moment of impact, more memory of what happened drifts into some clarity. Still not the moments post-crash, but the story leading up to it. “I was riding my bicycle through Gravelly Point Park and I hit a damn goose.”

“Never heard that one before,” good ole’ Doc Hansen says with a poorly concealed snicker. Instantly, I like this sarcastic SOB. I can relate.

“We’re going to need some x-rays and then I’ll be back to talk to you.” Carmen is at my ten, holding my hand and making a few calls to work, our daughters, etc. I’m focusing on funneling my now roaring ache into an internal feedback loop. If I let it out, it could be anything from a whimpering crybaby to the sound of a profanity-laced nuclear explosion. Even I don’t know what form it would take.

The vague image of the doctor in the bottom left corner of my field of view fades into the blackness surrounding the well-lit circle of interest focused on me. He is replaced by a huge machine that kind of looks like a giant microscope from my perspective and mental acuity in the moment. A (too) young technician is guiding this thing over what appears to be my left leg. I am coming to believe that the uncontrolled fall onto the paved bike path (the fall I don’t remember, and never will) has resulted in my having a broken leg. Well, crap. Might as well break a leg. I’ve broken damn near everything else at least once.

I have no idea how many x-ray pictures the tech has taken, but it is a good bit more than one. The machine is positioned in numerous angles around my lower Me. Eventually the tech wheels the machine away and, in that same lower-left corner of my range of view, she says, “That’s what I need.”

“I have a broken leg, don’t I?” I state as matter-of-factually as I can. In the presence of this woman, I must project the swash-buckling, devil-may-care toughness of a Marvel Comic hero.

“The doctor will be in to see you, shortly,” she says with a smile as she fades to black. Got it. You’re not allowed to say anything. Especially if it’s bad news. I’m screwed.

An unspecific time passes as I lay with my eyes closed. I may be trying to will this whole thing away. I might be replaying the accident, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. I might be dreaming about the x-ray tech. I don’t have a clue. In retrospect, perhaps by this point the doctor has ordered the inclusion of some morphine or other intoxicating substance into one of my IV’s and I’m just drifting along. But the doctor eventually returns, positioning himself in that grey area between light and infinite darkness.

“Well, you have a broken hip,” he says with such uninspired lack of emotion that I almost don’t grasp what he’s telling me. “We’re going to have to operate tomorrow morning at seven a.m.”

“Operate for what?” Carmen spurts. Her accent thickens as she searches for the right words in a moment like this.

“We’re going to have to do an emergency hip replacement,” he says. Finally, he gets to the explanation part I have been waiting for since I woke up on the grass in Gravelly Park. “Your Femur bone has a ball on the top end. It kind of looks like an ice cream cone.”

“Yes, I know,” I say. I grew up on a farm where we occasionally slaughtered a cow, hog or sheep for food. I have, of course, also gone through school. My knowledge of anatomy is based not just on drawings and images in text books, but in real life practice of breaking down carcasses into usable cuts of meat. I have seen first-hand, the “ice cream cone” at the top of a leg bone.

“Well,” Doc H says with a sigh. “Your ice cream cone is broken off from the rest of the femur. That can’t be fixed. You’re going to have a titanium hip joint put in tomorrow morning.” He goes on to explain how that works, demonstrating with a real sample titanium hip. “We cut the broken top of your femur off and then ream it out so we can push the tapered end of this joint down into your leg. That’s how we secure it. This new joint is fastened in place on your hip bone. The center piece goes through the existing hole in your hip, and this ring clamps it securely in place on the other side of the bone. This plastic-looking circular shape on the end of the ring forms the joint that the new ball, also covered with the same material, will move in. This is a new model that gives you one-hundred percent mobility of the leg, the same as you had before. Maybe even better.”

“A…hip…replacement?” My processing speed at this point is well below his delivery rate. I’m still working on his first sentence.

“Yes,” he says patiently. “We’re going to do the surgery tomorrow morning.”

“But I’m only sixty,” I protest. “I can’t have a hip replacement yet.”

“You don’t have a choice,” the good doc states flatly. “This is a really good replacement joint designed for sports activities. It’s the same joint that Bo Jackson has. He’s got two of them and still plays Major League Baseball. It’s so good that you’ll never need to get it replaced, even though your only sixty.”

He turns to leave, then stops in his tracks and spins around. “Oh, I almost forgot. Your left clavicle is broken.”

“I’ve already broken that one in two places,” I say.

“Three, now,” he quips and fades to black at my four.

Carmen fades in at my nine. It occurs to me that she has been on the phone, but I have no discernible memory of it.

“I’ve been talking to some of my ladies,” she says. Among Carmen’s ballet classes is a special group of older women, some of them quite good dancers, who have been students of hers for decades. “Joan had a hip replacement three years ago and she recommends her doctor. Maybe we should talk to him about doing this surgery. And Ruth says her husband’s hip replacement doctor was the best.”

“Okay, maybe we should call these guys,” I say reflexively. A chemical cocktail is beginning to nudge me through the La-La-Land portal. At this point, you could have shown me a carrot and told me it was a race car. I would have agreed.

Rainbows. Spinning lollipops. Spiral umbrellas. Unicorns. Some sort of time passage. I don’t know.

“Okay, we’re all set for the surgery tomorrow morning.” It’s Doc, um, what is his name?

“I’ve been talking to some of my friends about doctors to do the surgery,” Carmen begins. Having escorted two daughters from conception through college and into the world on their own, she knows how to advocate with doctors. Those lessons are kicking in.

“I appreciate that, and that’s normally a really good thing to do,” Doc Hansen says, politely interrupting the coming conversation he’s clearly had before. “But this is an emergency replacement. This needs to be taken care of immediately. It’s Friday night now. You can look for other doctors if you want, but by the time anyone else takes on this case, it will be too late for that bone. He’ll probably never walk again,” he adds in an almost warm and fuzzy way. Or, is that fuzziness coming from the drugs?

“Look,” he continues. “You don’t have a choice. I’m all you got.” Pivot into the blackness of the darkened room.

Carmen looks him up on line and discovers, much to our collective relief, that Doc Hansen has actually written a text book about hip replacements and is a well-known surgeon in this field. Relief, and morphine, course through my veins as I’m wheeled into a private room for the night.

There is nothing private about the room. Through the entire night there is not a thirty-minute period that goes by without some annoying interruption. IV’s need tending. Bottles need replacing. Rectal temperature readings need to be taken. A CT scan is done on my head because my bicycle helmet shows some damage and I was, apparently, unconscious. I mean, really, how many times do you have to take my blood pressure during the night? After three or four 120/80 readings, haven’t we established a pattern?

It’s five in the morning when the night of horror comes to an end as I’m rolled into an elevator, down an indeterminate (to me, anyway) number of floors, and into a surgery prep room. Although I’ve never seen this particular prep room before, I’m no stranger to the environs. I know one when I see it.

A couple of pleasant nurses (in direct contrast to Nurse PITA at the admitting desk) scurry around me, taping me up with sensors and whatnot, chatting with each other, and occasionally with me. They are particularly enthralled with the story that I’m in here because of a bicycle-Canada Goose collision. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m everybody’s first. Can we move on?

“How are you doing this morning,” Doc Hansen says breezily as he, well, breezes into the room.

“Yeah, I’ve been better,” I slur.

“Oh, funny story. You’re not going to believe this,” he says with a chuckle. He takes out a pen to autograph the proper leg to be operated on (Yes, let’s please not cut up the wrong leg!), and says, “After I saw you last night I went over to my brother’s house for dinner. Guess what he served us? Goose!”

“I hope it was the one I killed,” I shoot back faster than a goose can take out a bike.

“I’m Doctor Karden,” says a face at my three. She’s a new one. Before I can formulate a response, she says, “I’m your anesthesiologist.” She jabs a hypodermic needle into the IV line and begins squeezing a clear liquid into the system.

“Is that the juice that’s going to knock me out?” I ask. She grins, nods, and before she can say another word…nothing. Not darkness. Not fading out of consciousness. Not counting backwards from one hundred. Not a damn thing.

Light colored wood paneling, or shelving, or something made of light colored wood. That’s the first thing I remember seeing after the anesthesiologists smile. Some number of hours has passed. Three or four, I think. I’ll never really know for sure.

Nurses. Hoses. Bags full of fluid. Little machines beeping everywhere. Carmen. That miserable blood pressure cuff. Things are beginning to come back into focus. Sounds are beginning to coalesce into actual language. Awareness creeps in from the Gaussian edges around me.

“Hi,” Doctor Hansen says with a happy face. I’m hoping that’s good news. “Good news. The surgery went well. Everything is great. I’m going to come back in about three hours and you and I will take a little walk down the hallway, OK?”

“Sure,” I try to say. I’m not sure if I physically form the words or not, but I mean to. Nurses roll in and out, Carmen tells me that everything went really well, morphine is putting me in a good mood that doesn’t match my condition. Then, just a few hours after the surgery, the doc and a nurses assistant, a sturdy fellow, come into the room with a walker in hand. For the next half hour or so, the doc and the aide walk me up and down the corridor. My ability to put much pressure on the reattached leg is very weak, but I can actually do it. The doc is pleased, so I take some gratification in that and spend the rest of that day and night in a morphine induced level of vaporous consciousness.

The next morning, about 48 hours after I collided with the goose, and just over 24 hours after the surgery, the doc shows up for another therapy session. This time he and the nurse’s assistant have me navigate the hospital staircase. Too my amazement, I don’t fall down. I’m slow, feeble, and generally messed up. But, I can do it!

“You’re going to be fine,” the doctor says. “You’re a healer. I’m not even going to prescribe physical therapy for you. You’re in great shape. All you need to do is keep walking and working on it. Walk a little farther every day. Go from the walker to a cane as soon as you think you have enough stability. Stay active and restore the muscles around that leg. I’ve got nothing more for you. Go home.”

So I did. And he was right. To this day, the only reminder I have is that I set off the airport metal detector every time I fly.