On attending a bad accident

Since driving to Waitrose on the road to Clare last week when we passed a body lying across the road, I have slept badly for the last few nights. I pulled in past her and walked back to see if I could help; another car had pulled up and two older ladies were by the woman, who had come off her bike and lay, badly injured, unmoving. The women had a blanket and had called for an ambulance, so I knelt beside her to do a basic assessment, for she was deeply unconscious with her head in a pool of blood that had spread across the road. I was initially fearful that she was already dead, but she had a strong pulse and was breathing, but unresponsive. I removed her helmet and was able to slide the blanket beneath her head before the ambulance arrived, when the crew began a more professional assessment and attempted to insert a cannula in her arm. Though unresponsive to voice, this irritated her and she resisted, possibly through pain in her arm. The crew wondered if she had a neck injury too, so asked me to hold her head firmly to protect the neck from further damage. In the meantime, three police cars had drawn up, one to take details of the accident and two to block the road on either side. Clearly she had a severe brain injury to lead to such deep concussion, so the ambulance team also requested a Critical Care Team to attend.

Snow Hill, Clare

I was with her for about forty-five minutes; meanwhile, Ann had waited with the dog in the car. We puzzled about what had happened; the woman was about seventy, and could only have been riding at a sedate 10 mph on a heavy old bike with a shopping panier, now leaning against the hedge, and she was wearing a good cycle helmet. It seemed possible to us that this was unlikely to be a simple fall from a bike, and the police did later release a request for any witnesses, but the whole thing remains a puzzle, even to knowing her name, which has not been released. 

The cause for my disrupted sleep has partly been this poor woman, with my mind still circulating round while wishing to know more about her: where she lives, who her family are, and what led to this abrupt incident in her doubtless quiet life. I cannot walk into West Suffolk Hospital and just ask to see "the injured cyclist," so it is a curiosity that will not be sated and I may never know. Also, that part of Clare Road is technically called Snow Hill, the road on which Ann and I first lived when we moved to Suffolk, and where we had Edwin.

But deeper yet are the buried memories it has triggered: for I had been the Police Surgeon in Middlesbrough for thirteen years, and thereby called to every sudden death throughout the county of Cleveland. I believed the memories of these many, often gruesome, deaths were placed firmly in a cupboard with door locked firmly, but now it has burst open and those miserable, buried, disruptive calls in the middle of the night circulate again to disrupt good sleep. I woke again at 3:30 this morning, lying in bed till four when it was light and I come down to brew tea and type this up, hoping to expunge my mind a little of this new trauma.