Trips to the ER September 22, 2004 ~ 3:39 pm
Posted by Julie in : Daily Grind , trackbackSince we’re all self-proclaimed klutzes around here (read the comments from the previous post), I figured I’d tell you a little story about how I ended up in the ER with head/facial injuries three times in one month when I was 8. Yes, I am just that much of a klutz. Sometimes. Sometimes I can be very graceful, and then suddenly I will enter into an “awkward phase” and be covered in bumps and bruises. But onto the story.
I was going through one of those “awkward phases” when I was 8. Most of this is hazy in my memory, so Mom, feel free to correct me - you probably remember it better than I do.
Two of the incidents involved falls down flights of stairs. One down our interior stairs from the top of the second floor, one down the concrete stairs in front of our house. I don’t remember the interior stair trip, possibly because it wasn’t the first time I’d gone down them (I decided when I was about three that I could bring a chair down the steps and called my mom to come watch. I think she got her first grey hair that day as I rolled down.) The outer stairs I remember because I was dizzy and suddenly my feet were all tangled up in each other and I was on the sidewalk on my face. The third injury of that month happened on the playground at school when a bigger kid pushed me down.
Here’s the fun part. In all three falls, my body made contact with the ground at three points. My knee, my nose, and my forehead. Every damn time. As one scrape would start to heal, I’d mess it up again. I think I broke my nose twice that month, and learned that frozen peas in a latex glove (mom’s a nurse) conform to the shape of your broken nose and make it feel better. I also learned that concussions make you want to sleep and your mother won’t let you. But perhaps the most important thing I learned is what not to say at the hospital.
See, when you bring a child to the ER three times in one month, the doctors start to get suspicious. As a matter of course, they ask the child how they got hurt, to make sure there isn’t any child abuse going on. I was a shy little kid, totally unlike the extrovert I am now, mostly due to the evil nuns at the Catholic school I went to till second grade (that’s a story in and of itself). Anyway, I didn’t like talking to strangers, and got very nervous about them. I knew what had happened to me, but had no idea how to answer the question. How do you tell a perfect stranger you got pushed on the playground? Fortunately, I had my lifeline. My mom was in the room, she would make it better. Completely innocently, I looked at her and said “What was I supposed to say again, Mommy?” She looked at me and laughed and said “Tell them you won’t see me again, because they’re going to put me away for a long, long time.”
Fortunately, the ER doc could take a joke, and I was released with a slightly broader nose where it broke and a Beaver Valley Medical Center coloring book for my pains. But ever since I’ve always thought twice before answering a doctor’s questions.
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