Now to the current events, or more specifically the events of this past Tuesday. Mrs. Doctor, having the day off, had a couple cups of coffee with me before she gave me a ride to work. Her plans for the day included a bike ride up to Thumb Butte, a nice 5 mile climb into the pines that she does pretty regularly. The road is narrow and curvy, but in decent enough shape, and not too heavily travelled on an average weekday morning. Mrs Doctor crushed it up to the top of the climb, making it in about half an hour from our door step. This is when the situation began to deteriorate. She had begun the descent back into town, enjoying the fine morning northern Arizona was having. She moved toward the side of the road to make rooom for a passing car. Slightly miscalculating where the edge of the pavement was, she went off the edge into the narrow gravel shoulder. As she steered to get back on the pavement, the edge caught her front tire, sending her over the handlebars.
Around this time I was at work trying to do some catching up. Since my injury, things had gotten a little backed up. I got a worried sounding phone call from Mrs. Doctor, saying only "I think I hurt my self." She told me she had just crashed and cut herself and couldn't tell how bad it was. I was at work, on foot. The jeep was at the house, a two and half mile walk away. I hitched a ride with a customer for about half of it, walked the rest and got in the jeep only to find the fuel light on. By the time I got gas and made it Mrs. Doctor she had been hanging out on the side of the road for about 40 minutes since she had called me.
The cut was on the back of her elbow, so she couldn't really see it . This was probably a good thing. Apparently she had put her arm in front of her face as she crashed and slid a little bit down the pebble and sand covered, cheese grater style asphalt, putting a massive gash in her elbow and then packing it full of gravel. The wound was six to seven inches long, a narrow slit at the beginning on the back of her forearm spreading to a two inch wide, chewed up gravel filled mess on the back of her elbow. I couldn't believe it. I made her show it to me three different times as I was loading her bike in the jeep. It was so massive and just filled with dirt. Wearing one of the original black and white Seagal jerseys, and showing a stunning display of superior attitudde and superior state of mind, Mrs. Doctor calmly asked "Do you think we can just put some butterflys on it?" Trying not to show my surprise at the severity of the wound, I told her she probably needed a couple of stitches and to have them clean it out.
We arrived at the emergency room a short time later. I snapped a couple of pics on my cell phone in the parking lot and we went in, making her the second person to visit the ER in a Seagal jersey in a month's time. I can't get the pics off the phone onto the computer, so this post treatment shot will have to do:
The ER staff were shocked by how bad it was, their surprise was not well hidden in their reaction. It took about two hours of scrubbing and flushing the wound out with this wicked looking suction device to get all the gravel and sand out. She ended up with 21 stitches, they had to trim the jagged edges off of the wound to have something to sew up, mostly around the elbow area where the wound was widest. Mrs Doctor , in true Team Seagal fashion, took it like a champ. There is no crying in a Seagal jersey. There does seem to be a fair amount of crashing.
