Room 803 At Daytona

Room 803 at Daytona

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

EVERY MOTORCYCLE TRIP SHOULD, I have always believed, teach us at least one thing.

On one trip, for instance, I learned that Illinois is very long and flat. On another, I discovered that a brand-new, tight-fitting helmet that gives you a blinding headache in your driveway in Wisconsin, will continue to give you a blinding headache four days later in Montana.

And so it was with my trip to Daytona Bike Week this year, which produced a virtual bumper crop of hard-won wisdom. By the time I came home, cruising into the driveway with my Ford van 1 1 days later, I had learned two new things: (1) In hospitals, as in airports, small is better. {2)% When I die, I do not want my mortal remains entombed in any confined space; I want my ashes scattered into the wind along an open country road.

Odd conclusions, I suppose, but let me explain.

I made it to Daytona, driving solo, in three days. Pulled up to the beachfront motel on a Saturday evening, unloaded my Triumph 500 and rode around for a few hours. The next morning I rode out to the track to watch qualifying.

Parked my bike near the paddock, bent over to unhook a bungee cord, threw my back out with a violent stab of pain and fell on the ground.

I lay there for about 20 minutes, flat on my back, staring at the oily underside of my engine, waiting for the pain to subside. Many folks wandered by and admired my old Triumph.

“Nice original bike! What year is that?”

“A ’68 Tiger Competition model,” I croaked from my position of supine repose.

Gradually, I clawed my way up a nearby chainlink fence into a standing position, then walked around for a while, feeling a little better. I was eventually able to kickstart my bike and ride back to the hotel, where I took two aspirin and toppled into bed.

That night was a very long one. My back went into spasm and I am willing to say, unequivocally, that I have never experienced as much pain in my life, except maybe in Advanced Algebra class. At 6:30 in the morning, I woke my roommate, CW/Big Twin photographer Jeff Allen, and asked him to call an ambulance. I couldn’t reach the phone. I was hyperventilating and beginning to black out from pain.

An ambulance took me to Halifax Medical Center’s emergency room, where severe back pain has about the same urgency factor as an itching, flaking scalp. After a while, though, a doctor gave me a shot of Demerol, and a pain-numbing shot directly into my lower back.

With the help of three nurses, he got me into a standing position, had me take two steps and said, “Okay, you can go.”

“Go?” I said. “Go where?”

“Home.”

“Home? I’m staying in a hotel. What am I going to do, walk outside in my bare feet and hail a cab? If I lie down in bed. I’ll starve to death. I can’t get up.”

“Your insurance won’t cover a hospital stay for back pain if you are ambulatory,” he said wearily.

I looked him straight in the eye (as best I could while heavily drugged) and slurred, “You call thish ambulatory?”

Mere hours later I had myself a hospital bed, room 803 on the Orthopedic Ward, with a roommate named John, from New York City. John had been riding his Yamaha RD400 through downtown Daytona when a big Harley ran a red light, smashing his knee and breaking his left femur in three places. It took seven hours of surgery to reassemble and save his leg. The doctor assured him he would be able to ride motocross again, eventually.

John and I watched a lot of bad TV and got a lot of good painkillers for the next four days. The doctors and nurses at Halifax seemed competent and very nice, and the food was good. But the hospital, like so many modern institutions, is just plain too big.

It’s the kind of place where it can take hours to get back to your room after a simple X-ray, while you languish on a stretcher in various hallways. The sheer vastness of the place creates many affronts to logic and makes you feel lost in the Twilight Zone.

I resolved that for my next big illness (no hurry), I would call around and pick the smallest hospital in the county, even if their newest X-ray machine was installed in 1941 and they still believe in leeches.

The other revelation came from something called an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), which is sort of like being slid 10 feet down a tight cannon barrel for half an hour while magic pictures are taken of your innards. You must lie completely still, staring at a dimly lit ceiling three inches from your nose. It is Poe’s Premature Burial, done modern.

I did not think I had a hint of claustrophobia until this MRI exam. During the last 10 minutes I began to hallucinate that I was riding my Triumph down a tree-lined country road on a sunny day in spring, moving about freely with a limitless sky above.

It was then I swore I would have my ashes scattered along that imaginary road. No eternal chambers, please.

I’m home now, after three days on the road. Made the drive with frequent stops and the help of a motocross Gold Belt that Big Twin Editor Beau Pacheco bought me at a Daytona cycle shop. I’m still wearing the belt.

Not exactly vintage Daytona, as vacations go, but at least I have my two ironclad resolutions for compensation.

I also had the chance to review the differences between motorcycles and hospital beds, back-to-back. Confinement and helplessness versus motion and freedom; ultimate indoors, ultimate outdoors. Perfect opposites.

Going directly from one to another, the contrast is startling. It’s a comparison I hope not to make again soon. U