Anyhow, here's a story I actually wrote just for this blog (aren't you proud of me?), about one of the few times I've ever been to the emergency room.
Have no fear, it's not that gruesome.
Back in the day, I was a gymnast--and a pretty stellar one, if I do say so myself. I spent the majority of my free time risking my life: flying through the air while twisted like a pretzel, swinging around a chalked-up wooden bar, doing handstands on a four-inch-wide plank of death, and running full-speed toward a stationary object--all while wearing a brightly-colored leotard with one of those embarrassing '90's scrunchies tied up in my hair. (Don't worry, back then I had some serious guns that made defying death a whole lot easier than you might think.) That gym was my second home--though the snack bar was my first kitchen--and all of my friends and coaches made it a nice little community (and, let's be real, it kept me off the streets. Without that place, I'd have probably been a 9-year-old drug dealer on the streets of surburbia--or, you know, maybe just a bookworm.) (Okay, maybe just a bigger bookworm.)
Laura was my coach at the time of the incident. She was a semi-mysterious woman who looked like Ellen Degeneres--but she didn't have Ellen's winning personality. She lived alone, so far that I knew--a few of my teammates and I played croquet at her house once and noticed no other inhabitants--and she wore a lot of purple polos. I felt about as close to her as you might feel to an estranged aunt who lives upstate. I remember that she made me cry once. We were doing a hardcore conditioning practice and I was doing push-ups the "girl way" because--well, because I was a wee child being forced to do 500 push-ups, like I was in some kind of forced-labor torture camp, so of course I was trying to take the easy way out. She bent down and started screaming in my ear about how I had to start over and do them the "right" way, how it didn't matter if I was tired, I needed to do the push-ups like everyone else. Can you imagine: a grown woman in a tacky purple polo screaming into the ear of a 7-year-old who's sobbing her eyes out and dripping snot all over the floor? She was like a Chinese Nazi, and I was the underage athlete she wanted to send to the Olympics with a fake passport. But I digress.
It was a normal afternoon at the gym. We had recently gotten a tumbling track (a long strip of red bouncy flooring that helped you get more air in your flips--totally radical), and we had been practicing mostly on that. For several practices prior, our assistant coach, some stupid college dropout named Cory, had worked with us. But I wasn't having that. Cory was an infuriating person, and I'm pretty sure the only knowledge he had of gymnastics came from the backflips he had to do to get his high school diploma. I loathed him. So, the practice before, I had "accidentally" slapped him in the face when he was spotting me on a tumbling pass. Whoopsie. My teammates had erupted in applause; it was one of my finest moments, really. Cory had stormed off like an abused puppy (but not a cute puppy, more like one of those "World's Ugliest Dog" sorry-excuse-for-a-canine creatures), and now, clearly still bitter about getting schooled by a 9-year-old girl in Spandex, he refused to work with our team on the tumbling track.
Laura told us to work on tumbling passes that we might want to use in a competition routine. The problem was, there were several options to choose from and, even as a young child, indecision was that tiny hole in my Death Star in which you could shoot and quickly demolish me. (What a terrible Star Wars reference. I apologize.) I was grappling with this indecision as I stepped up to take my turn on the track. Laura wasn't paying much attention; we were the more mature kids of the gym, so her attention was better spent making sure the younger kids didn't suffocate in the foam pit. I wasn't nervous--I had been tumbling so long that the motions were second nature to me. I could probably have done a round-off-back-handspring-layout in my sleep. That turned out to be a problem, though, when my body took off running down the track before my mind was aware of what was happening. I was about to land the round-off when I realized that I hadn't decided which kind of tumbling pass to do. A back tuck? A half twist? A pike? I had completed the back handspring when, instead of deciding to stop tumbling, like a normal person might have done, I thought, "Well, how badly could this really turn out?" The tumbling track was squishy, so no matter what choice my body subconsciously made, I thought I'd either land on my feet like a lithe kitten, or fall on my butt on the pillowy, bouncy surface. No big deal.
Unfortunately, my body caught a whiff of my brain's untimely indecision, and it followed suit. As I began flipping, I was twisting--or was I?--I was tucking--or was I?--I was piking--or was I? To have seen that flip from the sidelines must have been like watching the Super 8 train wreck manifest itself in a human body. Not even Steven Spielberg could have CGI'd that tumbling pass. It was horrific. And, of course, contrary to my naive belief, my landing did not feel like jumping backwards onto a giant roll of Angel Soft. It hurt. It crunched. I let out some kind of savage yell that was probably more like a grunt--a sound that a neanderthal would have made if he had stubbed his toe on a big stone or something.
When I sat up after my gnarly crash, I felt an excruciating pain in my left arm. I looked over at it, and one of the bones in my forearm was clearly lodged on top of the other bone. I heard my teammates gasping from the other side of the track, but I paid them no attention. "Laura!" I called, fairly casually considering the circumstances. "What?" she asked from several yards away, not bothering to look over in my direction. "Um, is this broken? Can you tell?" I wasn't sure why I was asking her that, when clearly things were not ship-shape in the arm department, but I didn't want to incite panic. She walked calmly over to me, took one look at my arm, and said, "Oh yeah. I'd say that's broken. Someone go call an ambulance, please." (She sounded no more concerned than when I had had the stomach flu and she'd told me, "If you throw up, throw up on one mat. I don't want to clean up puke trails all over the gym.") Other little girls might have wanted a more alarmed response, but I appreciated that she wasn't making a big deal out of it. Usually I enjoyed being the center of attention, doing mini vaudeville acts and eccentric monologues to amuse my peers, but right at that moment, I wanted everyone to just mind their own business. Move along, nothing to see here, just an arm that looks like a five-car pile up is trapped under my skin.
I sat there nonchalantly, gingerly holding my arm out in front of me. I wasn't crying--I'm not really a crier in general, I've never even cried at a movie (no, not even Marley & Me)--I was just breathing a little heavily. There was pain, and it certainly wasn't a particularly enjoyable sensation, but I just kind of tuned it out and focused on calming everyone else down. Someone in the lobby had called an ambulance and notified Betsy, my best friend on the team's mom, who had been working the snack bar. She came running out with a cold bottle of water, and she was thoroughly distressed. She sat on the track and pulled me into her lap, stroking my hair, like I was a little baby bird that had fallen out of the nest. It was a nice gesture and all, but it wasn't really what I was looking for. I wanted someone to give me some answers. How long do you think I'll have to have a cast? When can I come back to the gym? What's for dinner--I'm hungry?
And then a horrific realization hit me--well, horrific in the eyes of the biggest nerd to ever enter the fourth grade: I've broken my left arm. My writing arm. Normally this wouldn't be a huge deal, I would just get extensions on some assignments, or have my parents do my writing for me. But what hit me was that it was only a week before state testing was to commence. State testing! The scores of which would determine if I would go to the best middle school in the city, where I could study fancy subjects like "language arts" and the ever-ambiguous "social studies" with the best tween scholars around, or some cracker-jack-box of a middle school, where the walls were painted gray to stifle creativity and kids beat you up for walking down the wrong hallway. This thought had me deeply concerned, and it was only after I started hyperventilating about it that the tears came. Betsy and Laura exchanged comments. "Oh, I guess the shock's worn off." "Yeah, poor thing, it's probably excruciating. It's okay, sweetie, you can cry."
They didn't understand. I tried to communicate my horror to them. "State testing! Left arm! Can't write! Schools! Scholars! Graaaaaay!" It just sounded like jibberish to them. They stopped listening. "Shhh, it's okay, we called your daddy, he's coming! You'll be alright!"
A couple minutes later, the ambulance arrived, with my father only seconds behind them. The paramedics jogged over to me, sat down, and started getting out their materials. For some reason I had an Eve "oh-my-God-where-is-my-fig-leaf" moment, feeling rather scantily clad in my shiny hot pink leotard in front of these strange men. One of them looked at me--I'm pretty sure they based the Brawny logo on this guy--and he said, "No worries, little girl. We're gonna put a splint on ya and drive you over to the hospital to get you all fixed up."
Just then my father clomped over to where the circus was being conducted. He didn't really say anything, but I didn't need him to. I could tell he was getting queasy from looking at my arm--he has no stomach for injuries; as a grown man, he cried when he got a few stitches taken out--so I told him to go wait in the lobby. He didn't object.
They had finished wrapping up my arm when the Brawny man looked at me again. "Okay, you can either ride in the big, awesome ambulance with us--and, of course, we'll turn on the cool sirens and everything--or you can ride with your dad."
Though at that moment I wasn't in the mood for theatrics, I had always wondered what it might be like to ride in an ambulance. "Will riding in the ambulance cost money?"
That was not a question he was expecting. "Well . . . Yeah, I guess they do charge you for it . . . ."
"Then I'll just ride with my dad." My father is quite the cheapskate--he has enough coupons to wallpaper the Taj Mahal--so I knew he'd have griped and groaned about me taking the ambulance. That was the last thing I needed. After all, I was still trying to figure out how I was going to pass state testing when my right-handed writing looked like someone had given fingerpaints to a baboon.
To my surprise, Laura touched my shoulder and said, "I'll ride with you." Her motives for this act were unknown to me--she had three practices still in session, and I already had a parent on the scene. I think she had a crush on Brawny man.
En route to the hospital, we didn't really say much. My father was trying to find a suitable radio station for the circumstances, but he gave up and turned the radio off. We rode in silence, my brain still whirring. State testing! Scholars! Gray! I began to dramatize everything to the point of paranoia. I could see my life crumbling around me: I would certainly fail the state testing; I'd have to repeat the fourth grade; I'd have to escape gunshots and battle the reduction of my IQ at sub-par middle and high schools; I wouldn't get into college--not even community college; and I'd probably wind up dealing crack to avoid being homeless. This was my actual train of thought. Clearly I was meant to be in the theatre.
We arrived at the hospital and entered the Emergency Room doors. My mom was waiting in the office for me, filling out some paperwork. I walked over and sat by her side. She hugged me (as best she could without messing with my arm) and said one of her classic mommy lines: "What happen', dolly girl?"
"I broke my arm," I said, as if to say, "DUH, my arm's wrapped up like baby Jesus in swaddling clothes." I then looked down to notice that my fingers were the size of nice, plump Italian sausages, and they were turning the color of Laura's polo. My mom and I laughed about how ridiculous it was.
Soon, I was carted away to get an x-ray of the crippled limb poking out from my left shoulder. My mother accompanied the nurse who wheeled me into the x-ray room. The woman working the x-ray machine looked no older than eighteen, and I could tell she seriously wanted to be on The Real World. Her medical knowledge couldn't have been any larger than a Post-It note--and neither was her capacity for empathy. She jostled my poor arm all around like it was a sack of potatoes that she was trying to shove into a tight space. "I don't know why you're here, this doesn't look broken to me." That's because it's under a splint, you DUMMY, I thought to myself. I didn't think she was even competent enough to brush her teeth in the morning, much less take my x-ray. But, after several painful minutes (and an exorbitant amount of botched attempts, at which she was quite amused), I was wheeled away and into a room where I was laid out on a table.
A nurse came in with some supplies to numb my arm and give me a shot of some kind of numbing agent in my upper thigh (and I mean upper upper thigh). "Okay, you can either keep your leotard on, or we can cut it off you and put you in a gown." Hmmmm . . . Cut me out of my leotard? Absolutely not, this was one of my favorites; and she was already about to give me a shot in my butt--I did not need the added embarrassment of being derobed of my Spandex. "I'll keep the leotard."
After she turned my arm as yellow as a Lay's potato chip bag, she left and the doctor came in. At least, he said he was a doctor. This looked like no doctor I'd ever seen. He was decked out in regular Joe clothes, some jeans, a t-shirt, and one of those '90's "windbreakers", with a navy blue baseball cap covering his mussed up hair. His face looked a bit like Neil Patrick Harris' (though I had no idea who that was at the time, obviously; had I made the same correlation today, I would've gone totally fangirl), he was wet--it had been raining--and he smelled like a big pot of homemade chili. "Hey, there, I'm Dr. Borden!" he said, his face upside down from my point of view. "Sorry for the clothes, I got the call while I was having dinner at home and I rushed right over." Great. I hope you at least had time to wash that chili off your hands, mister. "We're gonna fix you right up, and get those bones in your arm back in place! But, uh, mom, dad, you're probably gonna wanna leave the room. No worries, she's in good hands." My parents and Laura, somewhat bewildered and seriously worried, left the room with hesitation. "Sorry about that, kiddo. But this might hurt, and parents usually get real upset when their babies cry." I gave him a fake half-smile. Listen, dude, I am not a baby. I could probably do more pushups than you with an elephant chillin' on my back. You're named after a brand of milk, and I'm named after one of the most ballin' Biblical figures in history. Get out of town, buddy.
He felt around on my arm for a minute, and then looked at me gravely. "Okay, I'm about to put a lottttt of pressure on this arm here, and it might hurt. I'll count to three. Ready?" Get on with it, dude. "One . . . Two . . . Three!" I felt a snap in my arm like two Legos being pulled apart. I let out a throaty little ugh. He looked at me, a little puzzled. "What, what happened? Was that it . . . ?" I asked, a little irritated at how anticlimactic it had been. "Um, yeah," he said. "You really took that like a trooper." I grinned a little bit. Told ya so.
A week later, when I had to take the state testing, I was provided with a scribe. It was pretty official, actually. She not-so-subtly tried to give me some of the answers, though I didn't need her to--and, quite frankly, she was wrong a lot of the time; I guess that's how people lose Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?--and I wrote a pretty kickass story about some bobbleheads that came to life. My life wasn't ruined after all, and I have a cool purple (in honor of Laura's polos) cast as a memento of this raucous occasion.
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