July 18, 2023
Day 15: Vordingborg to Nykøbing hospital
Kevin was a lot better in the morning. His fever was gone and he appeared to be back on form. The same could not be said for his parents. We were both coughing and sneezing and I was growing more worried about the pain in my ribs. It had started when I’d fallen playing beach volleyball on Friday, my left elbow banging into my own ribs. It hadn’t been very bad at the time, I’d kept playing and even gone for that long run that evening, but it had been getting more painful each day. Coughing and sneezing was the worst, causing me a lot of pain, but this morning I couldn’t even pick Kevin up without pain. I was sufficiently worried, especially about why it kept getting worse, that I made an appointment to see a doctor in the afternoon.
In the meantime we tried to find fun things to do at the campsite without much success. There was a play area but it was a bit dreary and dilapidated. The same could be said of the mini golf course. We tried to play but gave up very quickly. Everything was just a bit worn out, including us.
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In the afternoon we went to the library in town which was better. Dea continued to hang out with Kevin there while I visited the doctor. I expected her to say I had bruised my ribs and should take it easy, and hopefully I’d get some strong painkillers. But instead she assessed my ribs and listened to my lungs with a stethoscope and then said “you need to go to a hospital, I think you might have a collapsed lung.”
That was a bit of a game changer. I rode back to the library to let Dea know, then to the train station. I needed to take the train to Nykøbing back on Falster as that was the nearest hospital. It was strange to be going back across the spider bridge with this crazy possibility that I might have a collapsed lung. It would certainly explain why my running had been so awful the other night, and why the pain kept getting worse as the lung got more deflated.
I got off the train in Nykøbing to cycle to the hospital but my bike wouldn’t work. The chain would not go around. I stopped to check and saw that I had an almost identical problem to that which Lukas had had on day one of this trip, my chain having come out of alignment and mangled a bit of the rear derailleur. It felt so hopeless - a collapsed lung, a broken bike, what more could go wrong?
Thankfully I was able to pull the chain out and realign it in a way that I could still cycle, even if I would now be turning up at the hospital with very oily hands. I rode there and was seen pretty fast by a nurse who checked my blood pressure and temperature and oxygen levels before sending me through to the acute ward.
I was given a bed but there were no available rooms so I was left at the end of a corridor. A different nurse took my blood pressure and temperature and oxygen levels again, and I got an ECG and gave a blood test and a urine test. This all took a couple of hours and nobody had checked my ribs or listened to my lungs. There was a lot of just sitting on this bed at the end of the corridor, with the situation becoming surprisingly comical. For example, my nurse seemed quite inexperienced, but she needed to put a needle in my arm so that it was ready if I needed to have something put in me, if I needed surgery or whatever (I also wasn’t allowed to eat or drink in case I needed surgery). I turned my head away as she inserted this needle because I don’t like that kind of thing, and as she was doing it, and I could feel the needle in me, she said, “oh no, I’ve done it wrong.” She kept fiddling with it for quite some time until she got it right. Then some other nurses came and started wheeling me away, talking to me in Danish as if I was somebody else, before realising their mistake and abandoning me in the middle of the corridor. Who knows what might have happened to me there, I could have got a new hip or something! Then there was also a very old grey-haired woman who kept sticking her head out of the door next to my feet, like some ghostly apparition. Eventually she made a very slow dash for the exit, and actually got all the way down the corridor and around the corner before the nurses escorted her back.
Eventually I was taken away for an x-ray and then a long time after that a doctor came and told me that there was nothing wrong with me. I was pretty sure there must be something wrong with me, what with all the pain, but no, they had done all the tests and checked the x-ray, and I was actually completely fine. He even listened to my lungs (after 4 hours at the hospital, the first time anyone did that) and declared “they sound fine!”
It was good to know that I didn’t have a collapsed lung or a broken rib anyway. “I think it’s just because you fell on it,” was the final diagnosis. And the best course of treatment? Try and stop sneezing. And with that I was discharged from the hospital. And I never did get those strong painkillers.
Today's ride: 17 km (11 miles)
Total: 339 km (211 miles)
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