life-saving care she received after a horrific crash on a rental bike.

Island residents are very fortunate to have King Edward VII Memorial Hospital, she says.

Mrs. Linda Hanna, a board member at Springfield hospital near her home in Philadelphia, was badly injured during a vacation here a year ago.

She was rushed to KEMH for emergency surgery and spent eight days in the hospital, four of them in intensive care.

Now she is back on the Island with her husband for another holiday and a special thank-you visit to hospital staff.

On a July afternoon Mrs. Hanna was riding the bike back to the couple's hotel, the Belmont, with her husband on the back.

Seeing heavy traffic, she tried to slow down. But she says the rear brake did not work, and that when she shut off the gas the moped stopped dead.

She was thrown into the air and impaled on the sharp points of a wall. Her husband escaped serious injury.

Mrs. Hanna's bowel was perforated in seven places, her pancreas and liver were bruised, her spleen was damaged and her arm had multiple fractures.

But after treatment at KEMH she was able to leave the Island without painkillers and can now play golf better than before the accident.

"My surgeon back home said he had never seen anybody come through anything like that,'' said Mrs. Hanna, 44.

"It was an excellent experience, though I wouldn't recommend the way I went about it.

"There were certain things I knew to look for -- the ratio of patients to nurses, the overall cleanliness, the amount of follow-through and communication.

"I was very impressed. There's a great deal more red tape back in Philadelphia.'' Mrs. Hanna said that in the States, bad incidents at a hospital did not get as much attention as they did in Bermuda, because there were more hospitals serving bigger areas.

People could go to another hospital if they had a bad experience, she said.

But in tiny Bermuda people were much more conscious of their local hospital.

Mrs. Hanna was not so enthusiastic about Bermuda's cycle liveries.

"They should give a little bit more instruction and make sure people know what they're doing.'' THANKS KING EDWARD -- Crash victim Mrs. Linda Hanna and husband Bob with intensive care staff nurse Miss Julia Stroud (right), one member of the hospital team that cared for her.