MY HERNIA EXPERIENCE – Peter J. Leibert

 

Many of you know that for few years I drove part time for a tour bus company.  The name of the bus company was Hot Dogger Tours.  This company also operated under the name of Gold Coast Tours.  When I first started working for them during 1990, they were located in Whittier, and later built a new facility which was in the city of Brea, CA.

 

Well, one day when I still considered myself to be a new tour bus driver, I was assigned to an easy trip of taking a group of men to a golf course in the Riverside area.  I let them off at the Green River Golf Course and drove back home where I helped my youngest son Steven move a piece of furniture.  Four or five hours later I went back to the Golf Course with the bus.  Since the golfers were late in finishing their golf games, I spent my leisure time doing some physical exercises.  This was part of my campaign to loose weight and get back to my slim, trim figure.  That morning, I weighed in at 207.5 pounds.  My highest weight had been 229 pounds.

 

Well, during that day, either moving the furniture or doing the exercises, I must have caused a rupture (an intrusive hernia) within my groin.  About the time the golfers were scheduled to return to the bus, I was beginning to recognize that I was having problems.  Perhaps the problem was my lifting those heavy golf bags and placing them into the bus storage area.  It was not long before I began to notice a bulge in my groin area which was about half the size of my fist.  I noticed it because it began to hurt – bad, then real bad, then extremely bad!

 

By the time the group finally returned to the bus, I knew I was having big problems.   Before I left the golf course, I began trying to reach the bus company dispatcher  on the radio.  With no success, I then began driving the group back to their hotel (which was near the LA airport – about 50 miles).  In those days, the radio systems had a number of blind spots within Los Angeles county, including the Santa Ana Canyon which is where I was situated.  But I felt I had to get somewhere where I could tell the bus company base to get another driver who could meet meet somewhere so I could go and get medical help.  I called on the radio three or four times and got no answer.

 

Finally, after I had driven pass the hills surrounding that Santa Ana River area, I tried the radio again and finally got through.  The dispatcher acknowledged my request and told me to stand by.   Two or three minutes after that, I came up on the "typical" Santa Ana Freeway rush hour traffic and had to slow down.  The traffic soon came to a complete stop.  My groin problem certainly was not getting any better.  It was really hurting and sweat was running down my forehead and getting into my eyes.

 

Some of the passengers seated nearby had recognized that I was having some type of serious problem quite soon after we left Green River.  When we got into this stop and go situation , they decided to get involved and wanted me to stop right there.  Three of the passengers finally surrounded me and told me to get out of drivers seat and lie down.  So right in the middle of the freeway, I turned on the bus flashers, set the brake, and they lifted me out of the driver’s seat and laid me down in the aisle.

 

So here I am, being taken out of my drivers seat by my own passengers and now lying "disabled" on the bus aisle.  In a final gasp of control I requested one of the passengers to radio the Hot Dogger base and let them know what had occurred.  It took a few minutes of instruction before I finally heard Whittier base acknowledge receiving his message.  Then I leaned back and relaxed on the bus floor.

 

Here I am, I had allowed myself to be removed from my drivers seat with my bus located in a center lane of one of the busiest freeways in southern California.  At least HDT dispatch knew that I was in big trouble and hopefully was taking action to help me out.  

During that same time, there were at least three dozen other Hot Dogger tour bus drivers listening to that same radio frequency around the Los Angeles basin and probably half of their passengers were also hearing this drama unfold.  I was not thinking of it at the time, but my son Craig told me later that at very least he and his entire tour group were hanging onto every word of those communications.  Later, I heard from at least a dozen other Hot Doggers drivers that similarly were closely monitoring the happenings of this situation.  It does not happen every day, you know.

 

But here I am, laying on the floor of the bus, not able to do anything.  The traffic around me eventually began to very slowly move by, but we were totally stopped in the next to the fast lane.  It probably was only a few minutes later when my bus passengers started yelling, waving and otherwise trying to get someone’s attention.  It turned out that it was a California Highway Patrolman that was slowly driving by on the right side of the bus.  He later told me that he already had noted that the bus in the center lane was not moving but gave it more attention when everyone on the bus started beating on the windows.

 

The CHP guy quickly blocked the right lanes of traffic,  so I figured that I had to get involved again to give instructions to one of my passengers so he could drive the bus off to the side of the road.  I was in bus number 531 which was one of the few buses Hot Dogger had at that time which had an automatic transmission.  It did take quite a few minutes to instruct this new “expert” bus driver what to do.  But he got the job done.

 

This young CHP fellow turned out to a trained EMT - an Emergency Medical Technician.  So very quickly he knew my blood pressure, pulse rate and had verified I had a big hernia.  “We better get you to a hospital right away,” was his conclusion and he left the bus. Oh thanks.

 

He had gone to call for an ambulance, the paramedics and all the other possible emergency equipment.  The bus company also had called for emergency equipment.  About that time a second Hot Dogger bus from the Golf course run came up and they stopped also.  At the peak, there were three CHP cars, a fire engine, a fire department paramedics truck, an ambulance, and two big 47 passenger tour buses.  After I had been taken off in the ambulance, a stretched limousine also arrived at the site (which the company had sent to take me to the hospital when I first made radio contact).  All of these vehicles were clogging the 91 freeway as if that freeway needed some help in getting clogged.  Westbound traffic during most of this time was stopped completely.

 

The ambulance had rushed me to the nearby Anaheim Memorial Hospital which was perhaps a mile or at the most 2 miles away from where I had stopped driving.  When I arrived I was eagerly awaited by "dozens of people", some of them were actually outside the front entrance of the Emergency Room with three or four gurneys.  I sensed they were disappointed when they found out that I was the only one coming in, and that I “only had a hernia”.   

 

It seems that the hospital emergency people had been notified to prepare to receive the victims from a “bus accident”.  They had taken action to clear the other patients out of their Emergency Room.  They also brought their ER staff up to 100 percent, as well as, notified two on-call surgeons to come in.  I quickly got placed on a bed at the hospital and then began a very long wait.  It was like almost everyone in the emergency room had disappeared.

 

I was hurting, and nothing was happening.  I tried to get the attention of anyone who walked by.  “Can you get me something to stop this pain?”  The first person that seemed to give me any attention was Virginia, my wife, who didn't arrive until over an hour after I did.  Then Debbie, Craig’s wife who is a nurse, got there.  Between the two, they found a hospital nurse that agreed to try to obtain permission to give me a shot to reduce the pain. 

 

Then Craig, my son who also was a bus driver for Hot Dogger, arrived.  He was in the process of telling me about all the excitement I had caused among the drivers who heard the scenario, when finally a medical doctor came in to see me.   That was at least two hours after I had arrived at the hospital.  I wonder what happens when they have real emergencies.

 

Since they were there, and I was there, we went through the process of relating all of my medical history, limited as it was.  They told me that they needed operate to return the protrusion into its proper place.  They suggested that they install some sort of a screen to reduce the probability of any reoccurrence of a hernia at that location, and finally I was moved into the hospital’s surgery section where I assume they repaired my hernia.  I just don’t remember that part.

 

The next thing I do remember is hearing this phone ringing, and ringing, and ringing.  After about a dozen rings, a nurse enters and hands me a phone.  “It’s for you.”  On the other end of the phone was the bus company boss, John Hartley, checking to find out how I was doing.  More likely, he was worried about whether he would have to pay the bill.  

 

Anyway, everything came out all right.  This ordeal had a fairly large tab.  The total was $6,667, most for the hospital and the doctors.  The county billed me $400 for sending an emergency response team, and the ambulance service sent me a bill for $300 to take me that short trip to the hospital.  I paid ten percent of the total bill, insurance covered the rest.  For all of this effort I did thank most of them. Two days later, I did get to go home from the hospital and discovered that I then weighed only 201 pounds.  That is what I call effective exercises.  I still was hurting at lot (from the operation) and did not drive any type of vehicle for about a week and didn’t drive tour buses for six weeks.