hospital 2 and 3

As soon as we could get her out of the hospital, we loaded up and took the group straight west to the coast.

That made us miss Astoria, a place I was looking forward to visiting again, but we were a few days behind, and it did not matter that much, really.

We found a campground, and slept well. The next day we rode our bicycles on the beach, a foolish idea, but it was a lot of fun.

The foolish part was that we filled every moving part full of sand.

When we woke up the following morning Linda complained of a serious headache. We quickly took her to the little hospital in Tilllamook. They looked at her and said we had to take her bak to Portland to St. Vincent’s hospital. They had better equipment and diagnostics.

St. Vincent's is where Emily went when we were in Portland, to be checked out for a possible appendicitis. It is not too far from where Linda and Emily live!

We drove, Linda, Miriam and I, in some silence. I did not know what to expect.

At St. Vincent's the doctor and staff treated Linda good. They checked and prodded, but they wanted to do some procedure that would necessitate injection of a dye so they could see it better. (This was way before computers were every where in hospitals).

The doctor, a good man who found our trip to be a fascinating adventure, told us of the risks involved with the dye. Usually there are no problems, but the list of possibilities included some pretty heavy words. However, he added, rarely do kids have any reaction to the dye. Well, after all of that, of course she had a reaction. BIG.

It was not life threatening, just another hurdle. After they got her over the dye reaction, they were sure nothing else was going on, but that she had had a major concussion and all sorts of nutty things could and was happening. But, they warned, keep her quiet, do not let her move around too much, and nothing remotely strenuous.

We stayed overnight, Linda at the hospital, Miriam and I at a nearby motel. I remember the movie we watched back at the motel: Norma Rae with Sally Field. While we were gone the guys carefully took all of the bicycles apart and cleaned out all of the sand. Bless them. They had become very competent bicycle mechanics.

If you bicycle the Oregon coast from North to South, we were on the ocean side of the highway all the way, and there is a wide shoulder for bicycles. There were a few tunnels, and the provided a button to push at the entrance, that made light to flash on both ends warning motorists that there were bicycles in the tunnel.

The rest of the trip went fairly well. We did not carry packs now, just water and maybe a snack. We would point to a spot on the map and have Arline (who was driving Jim’s VW bus) and Miriam (who was driving the borrowed van) meet us there with the food.

Remember Jim, my dear friend who died last year? His two teen age kids rode the whole trip. Jim and Dot met us at the hospital and rode with us down the coast.

That trip was the last of our serious bicycling. That accident took the wind out of the whole idea. We did some back packing into the Idaho Wilderness and in the winter we took up Cross Country Skiing, but then we went to Texas. Hmm.

Incidentally, I have lived most of my life without any health insurance, it just is not there for the small contractor. I paid for my kids birth out of my wages (you can tell how long ago that was). But this time I was working for a medium sized tile contractor whose benefits included health insurance for our whole family.

I just flashed that magic card and it was all covered. I am still amazed.

Maybe insurance does cause accidents!