Today was our usual lunch out with friends at the usual Sub­way. Today instead of my usual BMT or Cold Cut Trio I decided to try some­thing new. I told the girl behind the glass that I would like a 6″ Cheese Steak Sub on white. Her ques­tion to me was, “Do you want cheese on that?” I guess that par­tic­u­lar sand­wich was new to her too.

For­tu­nately in this case it stuck around.

I myself had an expe­ri­ence like that once. About a decade ago when we were heavy into moun­tain bik­ing, Donna and I took a trip to west­ern North Car­olina with the Augusta Bike Club to ride some trails and camp for the week­end. It was Sat­ur­day morn­ing and we were return­ing back to camp from our 11 mile loop. The last mile or so was all down­hill and Donna know­ing I liked to go faster than her said, “Wait for me at the bot­tom.” Off I went bar­rel­ing down. I was start­ing to catch some of the other rid­ers who were ahead of us when my front tire hit a rut or some­thing. My bike stopped and I did not. The next thing I knew I was com­ing to with peo­ple stand­ing over me, I was out for a minute or so. Best we can tell is that I went over the han­dle­bars and landed on my head break­ing my foam hel­met right in half lon­gi­tu­di­nally. I had a point and shoot cam­era in a fanny pack that was smashed from when I landed on my back after con­tin­u­ing my som­er­sault. I rode the last of the 1/2 mile down the hill with the thing both­er­ing me the most being a flap of skin the size of a dime miss­ing off my right index fin­ger. My cycle com­puter was stuck at 28.4 MPH, I guess that is how fast I was going before launch­ing myself off the bike. We packed up the car and headed back home because we knew I was not going to be rid­ing any­more and would be sore the next day and might not be in con­di­tion to drive the 4 hours home.

Yes­ter­day was Jared’s. He is the 10 year-old and youngest son of our friends. We have been baby sit­ting him and his brother once a month ever since they have been a year or so old. We have watched them play base­ball and bas­ket­ball for fun. When­ever we are free the 2 fam­i­lies get together for Sun­day lunch to catch up on how our weeks are going. When we didn’t get the call to lunch today we fig­ured they were busy with Jared play­ing base­ball. Later in the after­noon a mutual friend called to let us know that Jared was in the hos­pi­tal and had been since yes­ter­day evening. He was at a friend’s house and they were play­ing around the friends elec­tric scoot­ers. You know the kind, they go for like $150–200 with small gas engines. They can’t go too fast, but down hill they can get going pretty good. Jared was bar­rel­ing down a hill behind their house when the front wheel caught on some­thing and he and the scooter went down hard. The han­dle­bar got rotated 90 degrees and he slammed on top of that bar with his abdomen. The skin was not punc­tured do to the rub­ber grip on the end, but he hit with enough force that it pushed its way through the mus­cle and abdom­i­nal walls mush­ing up a sec­tion of small intes­tine. The intes­tine poked out of this fis­sure cre­at­ing a fist sized bulge under the skin. A trip to the Aiken Hos­pi­tal emer­gency room was fol­lowed by an ambu­lance trip to the Med­ical Col­lege of Georgia’s Children’s Hos­pi­tal in Augusta. Last night Jared had 40cm (8″) of his dam­aged small intes­tine removed. For the next 5 to 7 days will be fed intra­venously until he heals. Right now he is also get­ting a mor­phine drip to dull the pain of hav­ing had his entire small intes­tine pulled out of his body and then put back through a 6″ inci­sion in his belly to get inspected for any other damage.

One or two inches either way, in either of these instances, could have meant a bro­ken neck and quad­ri­ple­gia for me or a rup­tured aorta and death for him. Let’s be care­ful out there.