The infamous OCS ER-trip was something I had been assured of, it was an inevitability. It would happen to one of us, at one point during the program. The laws of probability demanded it. I admit I had, a few times, idly wondered who would take the trip and why. I never thought it would be me, or that I would I would be taken out so cruelly while speed walking towards public transportation (an activity that I not only loved but that I vainly believed to have mastered at a young age).
It happened so quickly I’m not totally sure what happened. One moment I was running down Victoria Street for the 24 bus back to the Pickwick and the next thing I knew I was flying towards the pavement face-first. I cannot think of a quicker or more effective way to crush any illusions I had harbored about being a “capable urban adult,” than to lie on the sidewalk with a smashed up face covered in dirt, blood, and tears (which sounds like it might have sounded kind of punk rock, but I assure you it did not).
Possible Culprits of my mysterious accident:
-The uneven pavement
-The worn down heels on my decaying boots
-Sabotage (I suspect the middle-aged woman who hastily apologized to me before hopping on the 24 bus and riding out of my life forever was involved in this)
– “Pedestrian Road Rage”
I immediately feared the worst, damage to my beloved schnoz, the crown jewel of my face. I ignored the cluster of concerned commuters that had formed around me as my hands flew to my nose, obsessively feeling every segment of cartilage and bone. A broken nose would mean plastic surgery of some kind, a betrayal (accidental or not) of my forced childhood membership into the “cult of Barbra Streisand’s unaltered nose” between repeated screenings of Hello Dolly, and The Way We Were. I could hear my father’s disappointed voice in my ears as I hopefully wiggled the all-important appendage from left to right “Barbra didn’t adapt, direct and star in in Yentl for you to fall on your face like an idiot.”
Luckily my nose was fine, as were my teeth, which, as was later pointed out to me, should have been my actual first priority. I had, however, sliced my chin open, and scraped myself badly along my jaw and around my eye. I wiped my face down as best I could with a single makeup remover wipe supplied by a witness to my tragic accident and tried to stem my bleeding with a few kleenex.
I spent my bus ride back to the Pickwick in a hypochondriacal spiral of panic, mentally testing myself for a concussion (which I doubt is very medically sound). “Who’s the US president?” an internal doctor demanded, “Barack Obama” my internal dialogue responded. I immediately winced, corrected myself, and momentarily wished for a true memory-altering brain injury.
After realizing that the cut on my chin was so deep that I could see my own subcutaneous fatty tissue (which is just as disgusting as it sounds) I realized that an ER visit was unavoidable.
I was nervous about going to the ER, something I had never done. My nurse mother, evidently, had never been particularly impressed by the various maladies my sisters and I had suffered throughout the years. However much we whined over our injuries, she never neglected to remind us that she had seen far worse. From my youngest sister biting all the way through her tongue, to my middle sister’s pneumonia fever induced hallucinations that she was in battle alongside the troops from Mulan, my mother had opted to treat us from home. The series long spidery scars running along my inner arm, remnants from an ill-advised foray into blindfolded bike riding, had always been stitch free. My devout Irish Catholic grandmother had done nothing more than drown the lacerations in hydrogen peroxide and advise me to walk down the block to the beach and wash them out in the ocean because it was the Feast of the Assumption and that meant that there was a Virgin Mary sanctioned “cure in the water”. My mother had approved heartily of this plan of action, taped a bit of gauze on my arm, and moved on.
Despite my nervousness, I was thrilled by the prospect of taking advantage of socialized medicine. The hospital was clean, organized, and full of kind nurses and doctors. I got my chin glued up after just a two-hour wait (which in an urban ER is quite prompt), making me feel like the whole ordeal was worth it just for the chance to experience the foreign allure of free health care. After just one week of looking freakishly disfigured—only one child asked his mother in horror what had happened to my face— I’m practically good as new.
I’d like to give some special shouts out to: Grace Johnson for taking me to the hospital and listening to my complaints for two hours in a hospital waiting room, the entire Pickwick staff for helping me get a cab and telling me how to navigate the hospital, the woman who gave me a wipe to clean off my face, and to socialized medicine everywhere.
