Somebody's Going to Emergency

March 05, 2006 | Category: In My Life

This is my best recollection....

Friday, March 3, 2006.

2:30PM and I was racing around the house dripping wet from the shower. Holding the towel closed. Looking for who only knows... 15 minutes left to leave the house to pick up Bear from school.

2:35PM and I felt a 'crunch' under my left heel as I walked near the front door. Picking up my bare foot, I see a flash of metal and feel a sting. I wondered what I'd stepped on, and hopped to the kitched to find the first aid kit.

2:36PM oh, yeah. It really hurt. And I think I'm bleeding.

2:37PM Deep breath. Dial CD at work to ask him if he knows where the Bactine is. Look down as I am dialing and see a thin river of blood flowing down from my heel, across my foot, and onto the floor. As CD answers, the puddle on the floor grows and trickles with the slight slope of the floor towards the stove.

2:38PM the sound of CD's voice startles me from my fascination with the red stream. I begin to feel the pain and start crying. "There's so much blood," I tell him when he answers. "You have to get Bear from school. I don't think I can drive."

2:39PM CD reaches his car in the parking lot 25 miles from home at a dead run. He is asking me for details, but I've become light-headed at what's going on South of my knees. CD and I hang up so he can call Bear's school. I tug the towel off my body and drop it under my foot to catch some of the blood. I am still wet from the shower, naked, and injured.

Not a lot of people I can think to call in this situation. Times like these, a woman's mother would come in handy - but she is about 1000 miles away. Dee is stuck downtown, at least 45 minutes away. She tell sme to call my neighbors or even 911. Maybe, if my bikini line was cleaned up. Heh. Did I mention the light-headed?

2:45PM and I am sitting on the floor of the den, with my foot up on a stool. The bleeding slows. I look around and try and figure out how much blood I've lost. Who knew heel wounds bleed so much?

2:50PM I pull myself up to a stand and hop to the bedroom.

3PM and I realize that after 10 minutes of puffing breath and whimpers that I have managed to put my underwear on inside out. No way I am going to the hospital with inside-out underwear. Plus, they got blood on them now.

3:15PM the bleeding slowed enough, I managed to pull on underwear and some clothes. Wrapping a fresh towel around my foot, I hop to the front room.

3:20PM leg propped up, watching a Law & Order rerun. Pretending there is no pain, no hurt.

3:50PM CD and Bear come racing through the door. CD says it looks like staples in my heel. Bear crawls next to me and kisses my foot gently. I beg CD to clean the kitchen floor before we go to the hospital (I have visions of the cats running through the puddles and leaving rusty-brown pawprints through through the house).

(Yes, CD wisely decides to indulge the crazy person who is me and cleans it up before hoisting me into the van for the trip to the hospital.)

4:15-4:25PM CD wheels me into Emergency to the nurses station. I sit and fill out the paperwork, my heel throbbing. I have no idea why it is so important to me to be polite and pleasant, but it is. Thus it takes about 10 minutes before the nurse realizes that there is something wrong.

4:26PM I am in ER bay 7 with 4 nurses looking at my foot. I am, it seems, the chief attraction in the zoo. Show and tell, anyway.

"Ooh," says one. "That must hurt." I start calling her 'Nurse Obvious' in my head.

4:35PM lovely ER doc pulls 12 quarter-inch steel staplegun staples from my heel in one swift motion.

"You want these as a trophy?" He asks, cleaning my wound and getting ready to superglue to the wound shut.

I shake my head violently. I have no idea how this clump of metal got on the floor by my front door.

In the background, you can here Bear at the nursing station insisting that they take him to his mommy right now. My little baby is channeling Shirley MacLaine from Terms of Endearment. The doc wraps about 300 bagazillion feet of gauze around my foot. I give the OK to Nurse Obvious to go bring Bear back to me.

5:30PM after an X-ray (to make sure nothing else was in the wound) and an antibiodic (my tetnus is up to date, thank the Lord) and some bemused advice from the doc ('think shoes...") and a hushed 'where did these staples come from?' discussion with CD and a couple "don't do wheelies in that wheelchair!" to Bear - we are dismissed.

After picking up Thai food (the doctor said "treat yourself as if you had just donated blood - good meal, lots of fluids, rest" - I decided that meant I could have chicken satay. Even though it was a Firday. In Lent) and getting back home, safe and sound, I decided that it was all right to cry and be a big baby.

And then I was like 'Gee whiz, as if I haven't been doing this every day since leaving Mega anyway....'

But I guess now I had a pretty concrete reason. Two long gashes that are superglued shut on my heel and the embarressment of being the talk of the Rush Hospital's ER room. Dork. Me.

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