Dangerous Pursuits
Sometimes doing the things you love gets you into hot water – but you do them anyway because life is made all the better for doing them. Our patients tonight each love a particular pastime and pay for it occasionally!
50-year-old motorcyclist Michelle is rushed to A&E after crashing head first into a lamppost. Michelle was riding back from a rally on the Isle of Man with her husband Rik when the crash happened. She was taken to a local hospital, but her injuries were so severe that she’s had to be transferred to St George’s.
Scans reveal that Michelle has broken bones in her neck, arm, ribs and shoulder. She’ll need emergency surgery to fix her shoulder and the medical team won’t know until afterwards if she will regain full use of her arm and hand.
“I’m split between never wanting her to step on a motorbike again, to ever go near one,” says Michelle’s daughter Alex. “But then I think if it makes her happy, you just got to let her get on and do it.”
69-year-old Timothy comes to St George’s after riding his bicycle into the back of a parked ambulance. He has plenty of bruises and needs stitches for a cut finger, plus a flat tyre. Timothy was training for a 100-mile charity bike ride at the time of the accident. He cycled around Europe as a young man; that trip ended with him crashing into a kilometre stone near Venice.
“I’ve been bicycling in London since I was ten. I used to bicycle up to Trafalgar Square and back, but there wasn’t much traffic then,” says Timothy. “As I got older, instead of being the quickest on the road I became the slowest… I always wanted to do a hundred miles when I was 70, and maybe once I’d done it I won’t want to do it again.”
Meanwhile 33-year-old Eleanor is in A&E after cutting her thumb at home on a meat cleaver. She needs stitches. “It can’t be worse than childbirth!” says Eleanor, who’s heavily pregnant and the baby is due in a week.
