Did I kill anyone? Surely I would know by now. The police would have come by. Even a little personal injury would have provoked a lawyer’s letter, would it not? One thing I do know is that I am not dead—but was it a close-run thing? Did I nearly die? When my case wound its way to Harley Street’s most eminent neurologist, he wondered in puzzled defeat whether I might like to check my phone. He’d seen people do it on the TV—track the victim’s movements to work out where they’d been, and for how long. But what would I do if I discovered I had been reckless? Would I report myself to the police, as sole witness to my own forgotten negligence? Better mystery than unpleasant awareness, I thought.
Here is what happened, or rather here are some undoubted facts laced with the known unknowns. At 11.20am on Friday 18th October I met with the GP at my local health centre, trying to get to the bottom of a mysteriously recurring gastroenteritis, which had laid me low for two weeks. I took the chance also to get my flu and Covid jabs, the busy nurse-practitioners brushing aside (as I wanted them to) any suggestion that I was not well enough to receive them. When I met the doctor, we reflected on my mystery stomach, she poking it about a bit, me reluctantly delivering a stool sample—and I was on my way.
Or was I? The last memory I have is of me leaving the practice, bike helmet in hand, yellow jacket on, reminding myself where I had left my pushbike. Did I then get on the bike? If I did, what route home did I choose for the 10-minute journey? I can answer neither question.
What I do know is that, some 40 minutes later, I became aware that I was home, standing in my front room, the (undamaged) bike carefully—nay, perfectly—parked, the (undamaged) helmet placed where it ought to have been, the (untorn) jacket on the couch. Puzzling texts (repetitive, confused) brought household members hurtling home, an ambulance was called (“Really do I need that? I’m fine. Just give me a minute to compose myself”), and then, quite suddenly, I was slumped on the couch, prostrated with pain. The man who cycled home (maybe) needed a stretcher to get to the ambulance outside his front door.
Parts of the pelvis were, it turned out, smashed into little pieces, the equivalent of being thrown out of a first-floor window or rammed by a van. But there is no even potentially culpable window, and where’s the van—how could it nip at me leaving no bike damage, or any external injuries? Can aggressive force be so delicate, so discriminating? The brain seems fine, the heart too, the stomach bug cleared up (the parasite Giardia—another mystery), the bowels in good shape (a colonoscopy provoked by the mischievous little Giardia confirmed that), and the pelvis has healed quickly. Even an old rotator cuff shoulder complaint that had dogged me for months has retreated, recognising its now-minor status in my hierarchy of bodily decay. I’m back cycling, and a return to tennis beckons.
♦♦♦
How could I have received such extraordinary attention at a time of such acute crisis in the NHS? I am an epitome of the paradox within our nationalised health care, of wonderful specialisms hidden within a structure that cannot cope with either the immediate (walk-ins at A&E departments) or the long-term (that interminably delayed hip replacement). I was sick enough to get whisked past walk-ins to my hospital bed, but not so ordinarily damaged that I could be sent home to wait months for the next step. And even then, after triaging on one potential explanation had taken me out of the NHS (“relax, there is nothing wrong with your brain”), I could pick up the telephone and deploy the private health insurance that I had taken out in a fit of post-Brexit anger seven years ago.
It’s been odd to be off work for as long as I have. An early denial that this was necessary—why, what are wheelchairs and morphine for, after all?—could not resist the plaintive cries from family and friends, and even from my bosses (insofar as a university professor has any). I’m back now, lecturing away, seeing the students, doing their references, attending my department’s meetings, writing my articles (even being unable to resist turning my travails into this piece for Prospect), doing my cases—in short, remaking my indispensability. “How can I be done without?” I seem to be shouting, into a world that has coped just fine without me for three months.
Once, not so long ago, after an hour or so of me declaiming about myself to a student group—the questions they were asking being confidently turned into platforms for yet further self-oriented eloquence—I was taken aback by a simple one: “Professor Gearty, how do you relax?” Tongue-tied, I tried desperately to recall whether I had a hobby or an allotment I’d forgotten about or, like my father, did a bit of fishing. But no. I’ll have to get an answer to that one. The real challenges, those of life, not mystery bike smashes, lie ahead.
