The Times Magazine 11or Danilo Martorana and Giulia
Scappina, July 31, 2021, was a day
like any other. She went to work as a
hairdresser; he went to work managing
a group of bars in central London.
Later, he called to say he’d be home
at 8pm. She pottered about their
small flat in northwest London
preparing dinner. His commute took
him 20 minutes, at most. At 8.30pm,
he still wasn’t home. She called his phone: no
answer. She called his colleagues: they didn’t
know any more than she did. “By 9pm,”
she says, “I was stressing out. It was way
too late. I was still ringing his phone and
he still wasn’t answering.” At 10pm, two
policemen rang the doorbell.
“One hour before, we had a normal
life,” she says. “We had plans, as every
young couple do: holidays,
spending time together... I was
just waiting for him to come
home. And an hour later...”
It was two months before
Martorana, now 29, came
home for dinner. He’d been
involved in an accident
that the paramedics refer
to briskly as “motorcyclist
versus car”. The car won. A
doctor and paramedic flew in
by air ambulance and he was
taken to St Mary’s Hospital
as a “code red” trauma,
reserved for the most serious,
life-threatening injuries. The
police told Scappina, who is
now 24, that she needed to go with them to
A&E, where she had to make potentially life-
changing decisions on his behalf. She thought
perhaps he would lose a leg. The reality was
that, by the time the police arrived at her
door, he could already have been dead.
His story is just one in a dramatic new
Channel 4 documentary series, Emergency.
Cameras follow London’s world-leading
emergency trauma service, set up ten years
ago in response to the 2005 London bombings.
Martorana was five minutes from home,
driving way above the speed limit at 60-70mph,
when he collided with a car. CCTV from the
scene shows him being catapulted over the
roof. He bounced along the road for 100 metres,
“punching” the road as he puts it, with pretty
much every part of his body apart from his
head. The impact was so powerful that his
shoes shot off, as if they’d been fired from
a gun, and the strap on his crash helmet
snapped automatically, so it didn’t throttle
him. His pelvis was pulverised, slamming into
the petrol tank of his Kawasaki Z680.
Scappina, his partner of three and a half
years, waited for more than an hour until a
doctor could talk to her. “He said there wasSATURDAY NIGHT
Dr Jess Payne, 38, senior registrar in
emergency medicine and intensive care,
on secondment last year to London’s
Air Ambulanceremember that day very clearly. It was nice
and sunny and the job details came through
on the iPad. There were two of us, me and
a paramedic. There wasn’t a huge amount
of information. We knew it was a road traffic
collision and there was a motorcyclist involved.
We landed in a private garden square in
northwest London and then we had a long
run to the ambulance, about a mile, with our
kit. We ran past the scene of the accident and
I noticed that the petrol tank, which sits right
in front of the pelvis, had a massive dent.
The patient was already in the back of
the ambulance and I could tell immediately
he was really unwell. The first you see in an
ambulance is the feet and his were extremely
pale. Normally you’d hear the crew chatting
to the patient, who would be sitting up and
talking. They were doing an incredible job but
I remember how stressed they looked.
In the ambulance you only really have
access to the patient’s right-hand side, which
is like doing a Formula One pitstop with only
half the car. I needed 360-degree access, so we
got him out. He was alert but spaced out. I did
a quick top to toe, to try to work out where
the injuries were. I was concerned that he had
a pelvic fracture and was bleeding internally
from his pelvis and his liver. I thought he was
probably bleeding to death. He had an obvious
wrist fracture and possible ankle fracture so we
realigned those bones to normal anatomical
alignment. It’s extremely painful, but if sharp
bits are pointing on nerves or a vein you want
to relieve that pressure as quickly as possible.
We had to start filling him with blood very
quickly. He was exsanguinating – it means
bleeding to death, but bleeding to death within
minutes. He was dying, no doubt about it;
100 per cent he was dying. We were at the
scene for something like 17 minutes, then we
transferred by ambulance to St Mary’s because
we were only eight minutes away, and it was
quicker than by air. I called ahead to let them
know that he was a code red trauma, which
refers to any trauma patient who we think
is exsanguinating. A code red brings the
senior members of the team down to the
emergency department, the senior registrars
and occasionally the consultants. He received
four or five units of blood and blood products
before he got to hospital.
I stand at the end of the bed and explain
the injuries to the team in A&E. It’s about
trying to get across the degree of force that’s
been transmitted through the patient’s body,F
a 95 per cent chance that he wouldn’t survive.
He told me roughly what was going on with
his injuries, and they were planning to do the
first surgery on his aorta, but they were not
optimistic. They said nobody really makes it.”
It was three weeks before she was able to
see him. Over the first 48 hours, Martorana
underwent surgery on his heart and his pelvis.
Shortly before he was discharged from intensive
care, three weeks later, they discovered a
problem with his small bowel, which required
further surgery. At one point his stomach was
left open after surgery for a week, because his
bowels were so swollen the skin wouldn’t stretch
to cover the wound. He remembers nothing of
the days leading to the accident or the accident
itself. His first memory afterwards is of seeing
Scappina, whom he describes as his rock. He
hates what she has gone through on his behalf.
“When I saw her, I was
like, ‘Everything is OK now.
Let’s go home.’ I didn’t hurt
at all. I was full of morphine!
The people around me
suffered so much. I was in
a coma; I would survive or
not. For me, it was a spa day,
but for them, it was so hard.”
Scappina visited every
day after work, trying to
keep his spirits up. Before
his accident, he weighed
82kg and kept fit by boxing.
When he left hospital
in October, he weighed
55kg and couldn’t walk.
For the first three months
he wasn’t allowed to move while his pelvis
healed. By the time he started physio, his
muscles had wasted. Sitting down was painful;
sitting up was painful. He had to learn how
to walk again.
Before the accident the couple had planned
a trip to Puglia. “I was going to ask Giulia
to marry me,” he says ruefully. Back then,
working 70-hour weeks was not uncommon.
They were like ships passing in the night: she
would get home from work just as he would
leave. Not any more. In future, he says, he’s
going to take time off for himself and for her,
and maybe one day for their family, “if God
wants”. He can walk for half an hour now, and
is going back to work next month, taking it
slowly at first. He’d get back on a motorbike
if it was just up to him, but it isn’t.
“It’s not a motorbike problem,” he
argues. “Shit happens. It was an accident
and accidents happen.”
“Yes,” says Scappina, rolling her eyes, “and
you broke your leg in a motorbike accident
when you were 16. His mother says he doesn’t
have a single bone in his body the way he was
born. Both your accidents were on motorbikes.
Let’s not make it three.”I
Danilo Martorana and Giulia ScappinaPREVIOUS SPREAD: HAIR AND MAKE-UP, CAROL SULLIVAN AT ARLINGTON ARTISTS USING BENNY HANCOCK FOR MEN AND INNERSENSE. JACKET, BIKE SHED MOTORCYCLE CLUB (BIKESHEDMOTO.COM). THIS PAGE: COURTESY OF DANILO MARTORANA AND GIULIA SCAPPINA