- Accident3.jpg (410.6 KiB) Viewed 25885 times
- Accident2.jpg (329.51 KiB) Viewed 25885 times
- Accident1.jpg (401.44 KiB) Viewed 25885 times
At some point we will give you a complete tour of the drawing and the methods used, but at this point I think you will be interested in the accounts of the following ‘adventures’ by David. From this point on, all of the words are from David. — Alfred Scott
I had a serious motor vehicle accident on 15th January 2020 and am lucky to be alive. We were driving along a road from the east coast towards Armidale 120km SE of Inverell when I encountered a large storm front. Christine, my wife was in the passenger seat with me. I slowed down to 80km/h before we encountered the heavy rain and all was well for 200 metres when I encountered a diesel spill on the roadway. Combined with the heavy rain, it was like driving on a skating rink. I ran off the road into the table drain where the vehicle caught its passenger side wheels in the table drain and pivoted, overturning sideway, passenger side first.
Someone phoned the emergency number and rescue people, police and ambulance people attended probably 30 minutes later. We were 35km east of Armidale. Christine had a bad cut on her left forearm, and we both had assorted cracked ribs and clavicles. By the time the rescue people arrived, we could talk to them and they cut us out of the vehicle, and we were able to walk up to the road and climb onto the gurneys of two ambulances.
The airbag on the passenger side deployed and while the vehicle was upside down, the front of the vehicle encountered a lump of shaley material in the drain which spun the car around 180˚ and then it had sufficient momentum to come back onto its wheels facing the way I had come from. We were thankful for the fact that we were upright. We were both knocked out, Christine by the side airbag and my right ear came into contact with the door pillar on my side.
We thought we had escaped with minimal injuries but two months later a CT scan showed I had blood on both sides of my brain. I was flown by aerial ambulance to Newcastle just north of Sydney where they performed two mini-craniotomies to evacuate the blood from the left and right sides of my brain.
They cut a line in the scalp 100mm long for each mini-craniotomy, and insert retractors to draw open the scalp, then used a hole saw 35mm in diameter to cut a hole in the skull and to evacuate the blood, put the bone back in, and stitch the scalp together. They left two drains in for two days with a duck-egg-like container. The left side gathered 100mL and the right side 40mL. We came home by surface transport five days later. They implied that I might need the left side to be done again because of the large amount that came into the drain. It was done again five weeks later, but they couldn’t get the bone back in because it hadn’t knitted sufficiently, so they inserted a titanium plate suitably sterilised.
I again was only in hospital for five days before they transferred me home by surface transport. I was unfortunate enough to get an infection under the plate ten days later and had to be flown to hospital a third time and they took the plate out, drained the gunk, and it took them two days to identify the bacteria and then they knew which antibiotic to use to fight it. I was unconscious for two days, had lost the ability to speak and the use of my right arm. Fortunately, the antibiotic meropenem intravenously every eight hours for five weeks and then bactrim orally for another seven weeks has cleared up the infection and I have got my speech and the use of my right arm back with some rehabilitation assistance.
I was in hospital for three weeks, in a rehab facility for three weeks where they offered occupational therapy, speech pathology and physiotherapy. Then because I am working on the route planning for the railway project at age 74, they offered me place in the Hunter Brain Injury Service to fine-tune me for work for another four weeks. All of this was free. I am very thankful that we have a wonderful hospital system in Australia.