Yesterday I was running a bit late for an appointment. Gorgeous day in Denver, it’s 3.5 miles away, parking is a pain, so I decided to ride my new-to-me (but used) road bike. A 17-pound carbon-fiber Scott CR-1 indeed gets one from Lowry to Cherry Creek faster than a 30-lb, circa-1992 steel Specialized Rockhopper (this was before front suspension, much less rear).
The Scott has clip-in pedals. On the way back, just short of the house, I pulled up to the light at Quebec Street, always busy. I slowed down and was fiddling with the gears, then sensed myself tipping. My left foot, anchored, would not budge. I then sensed myself smashing to the ground, very vivid.
There was pain, but I got up conspicuously quickly, like a wide receiver who’s just been hammered by a free safety. I didn’t check the faces in the cars lined up behind me, but I know I’d have been chuckling. And up the hill and home I rode, my left elbow and shoulder smarting. The bigger issue was the left hand, which I’d torn open and filled with grit right where you used to blister from the monkey bars.
I found some gauze and some medical tape and kludged together a dressing that looked something like an ugly white bracelet about to fall off my wrist.
Which brings us to the random act of kindness. This morning, after riding the Rockhopper to the Anschutz Medical Campus without incident, I chased around Omer Mei-Dan, MD, an orthopedic surgeon who just started at University of Colorado. He specializes in hips these days, but he’s better known in some circles as one of Israel’s foremost extreme-sports athletes. Prior to chasing him around, I watched online video of him jumping off all variety of precipices (precipi?), all over the world. This made the 15 minutes I stood watching him discuss a hip case with a doc in Colorado Children’s Hospital all the stranger.
so I was standing in a crowded nurse’s station, holding a reporter’s notebook, trying to not look out of place (fail), and not really comprehending the discussion at hand (something about a labrum, which, though it sounds gynecological, is not), when a nurse stopped and looked at my very sad gauzy patch-and-tape job. With no irony, she asked, “would you like me to dress that?”
I turned 43 in December, so I’m a good deal more ripened than the Colorado Children’s Hospital’s usual clientele. It also seemed like these surgeons were wrapping up their hip discussion. Plus I felt guilt about stealing nursing time from some child in need.
“That is so kind of you,” I said, “but I think these guys are wrapping up.”
“Hold on,” she said, and disappeared around a corner.
She reappeared just as the doctors were signing off. She held a short stack of medical supplies. She handed it to me and quickly explained what to do. Break this, apply this, stick that on top. I nodded in semi-comprehension. These were not Band-Aids, but hospital-grade wound covers: a bunch of 3M Tegraderm Film in two sizes, Kendall Curity gauze sponges, compound benzoin tincture (flammable!). I was too surprised to ask her name, and she’d probably rather I hadn’t, given the supply expense The Children’s Hospital was incurring at her hand for my hand — that of a University of Colorado Hospital writer, no less.
I walked out more amazed with her than with Mei-Dan. The episode reinforced what I’ve come to understand about nurses, at least at hospitals of the caliber of Children’s and UCH: That so often, they quietly they live up to standards of compassion set by Florence Nightingale herself.
A product of a nurse's kindness (on the left side, the shiny stuff being the membrane-like adhesive of the Tegaderm film; on the right, over a lesser wound, is a standard Band-Aid).
