If.

If I would go back and relive my life, I might do some things differently. 

If I didn’t immediately lock up when taking a test of any sort, and if I didn’t retain vivid memories quite as easily, I’d pursue a career in the medical field.

Terms like Blood Sats, V-tach, Epinephrine, and Patient Care would be commonalities rather than novelties.

But even if I didn’t lock up, and my memory were less sharp, I would more than likely have failed in it. 

Because I wouldn’t have known what I learned about 3 years ago, and I know what I learned is pivotal to a successful medical career.

*****

It was an extremely hot and windy summer day.

I had just received a fresh load of hominy a day or two previous, and as the wind started to kick up, so the hominy started to leave.

I was busy and as I drove by, I saw the tarp we used to cover the hominy was flapping madly in the wind. 

I called my good wife and asked her to run out there to weight it down with some cinder blocks and railroad ties.

I forgot all about it until a couple of hours later, when I made it back home and saw the tarp was still flapping madly.

And I got madly.  (To my shame)

Jumping on the four-wheeler, I buzzed out there to try to take care of the situation.  It wasn’t easy, because by then the wind was really messing around, and the more I tried to capture that tarp, the more hominy I got in my eyes, and the more the tarp snapped and cackled at me.

And I got more madly.  (To my shame)

Finally, I felt I had done what I could, and I jumped on the four-wheeler, and all my madlies got pushed into the throttle. 

I saw the corner coming up faster than it ever had, and laughed at it.  I had this, I thought, in my madly crazed state of mind.  I’d hold that throttle stuck until the last instant, snap off it and onto the brakes and drift that corner like I used to do when I was a fair bit younger.

The drift started out right, even if it was at warp speed. 

But there was a big rock that seemed positioned precisely at a right angle to the rear tire now in a full skid.  (I deduced all this a couple of weeks later by following my still visible tracks.)

The rock had a huge tipping factor to it, and an instant later, I knew my four-wheeler and I were on separate excursions.  I caught a blurred split-second snapshot of it tumbling very ungracefully off to my left and comprehensibly thought, “I hope it doesn’t turn directions and land on me.”

Meanwhile, I was stretched out, all of my 6 feet, upside down, back facing the forward and front side of me looking back the way I had come, while still travelling at the original speed.

This was all fine, as long as I stayed airborne.

But sooner or later, in this case sooner, perhaps because of the extra pounds the sweet daughter says I carry, my head dipped lower and lower until it skidded along amongst the rocks and gravel, picking up small pieces of sand in its back trail and throwing them into my eyes.

Allow me to share a brief testimony here.

If you have ever been upended, and your head is divoting around like the point of a spinning top, and your body moving along at 35 m.p.h. or so, then you will agree that it gets very noisy as those rocks keep clobbering away at the top of your head.

But it doesn’t last long.  Because the weight of your upper body, (wait, is it still your upper body when you are upside down?) starts to bear more and more upon said head and eventually that head buckles under, and you realize, very distinctly in that moment, that the next move your body takes will be entirely up to fate. 

In this case, my body took up the motion of a defective gyroscope as I wheelied and bounded this way and that. 

I came to rest on my belly, head scrunched down partially underneath, and my right arm and shoulder at a funny place with a funny feeling in them. 

Suddenly, the heat became intense.

I tried to roll over, and found as soon as I moved my head, that I lost all feeling in my upper body.  So, I stayed put, and gingerly reached into my left front jean pocket for my phone. 

It was still there, thankfully, and neither was it broken. 

Even though I was less than a hundred feet from the house, with the noise of the A/C running and being in a blind spot visually, I figured I’d be there a while if I didn’t make a call to my good wife.

She and the sweet daughter were out in milliseconds, it seemed, and much to my disbelief, called 911. 

In a case like that, you sort of have to go with what they put on you.

Our local emergency services arrived in a very short time; a couple of the guys came on personal vehicles directly and began their assessment. 

Gentle hands folded me over onto my back and onto the backboard, keeping my head and neck stationary during the whole process.  My shoulder hurt, there was sand in my eyes, but more than anything, I was so hot I couldn’t breathe.  My good wife and daughter stood in between me and the sun as much as possible to help with that.

I was soon loaded, by those same gentle, kind hands, into the back of the sick wagon, and we began to pick up speed, rapidly because of the damage they thought I might have to my neck, in the direction of the emergency room.

And here is where I would have failed, had my career in medicine been successful, and had I been in Sid’s place at my side, or Doug’s place behind the wheel with my wife riding shotgun.

I would have failed in patient care, to be sure.

I’m guessing the facts come instinctively to those who take care of us injured ones in situations like that.

But facts, proper cc’s and IV placements, aren’t the patient care that made the difference for me that day. 

I heard Doug’s calm, kind voice, fading in and out of the siren and ridiculous speed he was driving, as he eased my good wife’s fears.  I don’t remember anymore what he said, but I know it made a difference.

Because of my broken collarbone, I suppose, my right arm didn’t want to stay by my side and kept dropping off the gurney to the floor. 

Sid noticed.  It had nothing to do with the facts, but everything to do with patient care.

“Here,” he said, “I’ll put my knee right beside you and you can rest your arm on my leg.”

My eyes were shut during that whole trip because they hurt so badly from the sand in them, so I couldn’t see, but I’m guessing it wasn’t the most natural place for him to put his knee for each of the 20 minutes that it took to get me to the hospital.

Neither did the lesson in patient care stop when I arrived at the hospital.  My shirt had been cut off, and after the extreme pain of trying stay in position for x-rays, I was as desperately cold as I had been hot less than an hour earlier. 

My nurse Jared brought in some heated blankets without being asked.  Sensing I was in pain, he injected a drug, the likes of which street users would have paid dearly for.  My body, not being used to it, reacted by seizing up momentarily.  His kind words, together with his quiet chuckle, “Didn’t like that too well, did you?” as I eased off into a medicated bliss calmed my fears as to what was going on and told me that he had noticed what felt like was loss of control when the drug hit.

I know now what I didn’t know 3 years ago, thanks to all the kind hands and hearts that helped me that day . . .

Be patient in your care, whether you are a medical professional, teacher, or just a plain ole mom or dad. 

And I realize that what I just wrote probably isn’t the textbook definition of patient care.  But that’s what got through to me that day, and it made all the difference.