If you are familiar with the children’s book classic, “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” by Judith Viorst, let me just say this … Alexander’s day had nothing on our yesterday. Our day included an early morning kitchen emergency, a real emergency room emergency, and our usual adventures with “Habla ingles? Un poco español” but this time tinged with a little panic.
I’ll just say right up front that I have no broken bones and am maybe just a little worse for wear. I’m on the shelf for a few weeks after a fall rendered me looking and feeling like I’d been in a car wreck. But I am ok. Severely sprained ankle and bruises all over my body. I’m a ton better than the guy at the emergency room whose shirt was covered in blood and his bandaged hand showed maybe two fingers left. Counting my blessings.
I was on a six-foot ladder that I’ve been using for painting for the past couple of weeks with no incident. Indoor ladder, stable, nothing dangerous about it. I wasn’t even on the highest rung. But evidently the sides weren’t locked into place - user error - and in the space of about two seconds, I felt it give way and collapse inward as I crashed to the floor. Melanie was not home - she’d left to go the hardware store down the street - and by “down the street” I mean down and around mountain roads, where dodging potholes and navigating speed bumps and oncoming traffic makes the average speed about 15-20 mph.
On the floor, I immediately took stock of my body - is everything still attached? Am I bleeding? - and decided I was in one piece. My next thought was what hurts most - both ankles, my left knee, my head (which had hit the concrete wall on the way down) and my tailbone were contenders for most painful spot. I tried to get up for some ice, but when I saw how misshapen my right ankle was and how it wouldn’t sit straight on the floor, I decided against getting up. So I crawled to the freezer, holding my right foot aloft, for an ice pack. I crawled back to the wall, leaned against it, and did what I always do in times of personal emergency - I called Melanie.
She was in the hardware checkout line and answered the phone by asking “Did you think of something else?”
“No,” I said. “I think I broke my ankle.”
“I’m on my way,” she said without hesitation. As I mentioned before, nobody gets anywhere quickly, so I leaned my head against the wall and cried while I waited. In the hardware store, Melanie told the salesman, “I have an emergency. I have to leave. Can I come back and get the paint later?” “Of course,” she was told, and she was on her way to me.
An aside here that complicates things - our driveway is being rebuilt after the yard waste hauler truck discovered just how thin the concrete was over the culvert that runs under our driveway. It broke through, and the contractors are in the midst of repairs - think giant water drain pipes, screening, new concrete. So temporarily, we’re parking in the lot up the hill next door. Melanie called when she was nearing home and said “(Our contractor) Carlos thinks I can drive over the concrete edges to get up to the carport and the house.”
Great, I thought, I can crawl out the door to the car. Then I looked out the window and was reminded that there is a giant pile of rock just inside the gate. Melanie would not be able to get to the carport. “I’ll just crawl to the street,” I said. “There’s no way I can put any weight on it.”
So from our front door, across the yard and to the street - about 60 feet - Melanie put down door mats and an old drop cloth for me to crawl on.
Every time I got to the end my “carpet,” she ran back to the back, picked it up, and laid it down again in front. After an excruciatingly painful and slow crawl, I made it to the car, and managed through serious pain to hoist myself into the car seat.
We looked up “urgencias medicas” on our Waze app and headed to the nearest emergency room. When we got there, and with no idea how to navigate this system, I saw an open door and said “There’s a wheelchair. Get that.” Melanie got me in the door with the wheelchair and gathered essentials from the car. I saw an orderly, who of course spoke about as much English as I do Spanish, but being his helpful Tico self, took a look at my ankle and started wheeling me into the hospital.
Here’s how that system works - everybody gets into the same Admissions line. Once you’re checked into the system, everybody gets into the same Vital Signs line. You are taken when your turn comes. It’s a long wait. After Vital Signs, everybody waits for something comparable to Triage. When you’re done with that, you wait with everybody else until your name is called for Consultation. This is when you first see the doctor.
While we were waiting, we witnessed a heart-wrenching scene in which the aforementioned gentlemen with three fewer fingers found his wife and children in the waiting room. He came in, presumably by ambulance, and when he walked into the waiting room, shirt soaked in blood and holding his bloody hand skyward, his wife burst into tears and ran to him. He consoled her as best he could and hugged his two traumatized children. He left them again to get treatment, but at that moment, letting them know he would be ok was most important. I said a silent prayer for his family and one of gratitude that I had just a sprained ankle and all my digits intact.
When I finally saw my doctor, she and I used Google translator. “Fell off ladder. Headache. Tailbone. Ankle,” I typed. “Lost consciousness?” she typed back. “No,” I confirmed. She typed up x-ray orders for my ankle, my low back and my head.
With my orders in hand, I backed out into the hallway, where another kind soul took pity on me, looked at the orders and wheeled me to radiology. I texted Melanie, who was off searching for a snack to sustain us - we hadn’t had anything to eat. We waited in the radiology line, and the x-ray technician took six views of my head, back and ankle. Tears rolled down into my ears as he tried to get my uncooperative foot into the correct position for an x-ray.
When he said “finish,” I wanted to kiss him. We found our way back to the waiting room to see the doctor again. We were barely in her room when she announced “no fracturas” with a smile on her face. She sent us to the “Inyectables” room where I received a painful anti inflammatory injection from a nurse who took a look at my foot and kept asking, “No fractura? No fractura?” over and over.
Then we were sent to the farmacia for pain pills, and from there to the checkout window. Because we don’t have our CAJA cards yet, which would grant us universal health care at 100% for procedures, appointments, hospital visits and prescription drugs, we were still on the hook for whatever this cost. I told Melanie, “I’ve got a ton a credit, and it is what it is. Whatever it costs is whatever it costs.”
It cost - for the hospital & doctor fees, the six x-rays, the injection and the prescription - $194.
I waited in the hospital hallway while Melanie went to find crutches. They don’t just automatically give you crutches in the ER here, so she found a farmacia nearby that had some. She brought them back, I put them together and sized them while she went to the get the car. It was about four hours after this ordeal started. By the time we got home, and I crawled back into the house, we realized this was laundry day and neither of the beds had sheets on. At this point, everything is up to Melanie, of course, and she made my bed while I lay on top of hers waiting.
A word or a thousand here about Melanie … among her many talents, she is the consummate Florence Nightingale. She carefully washed my foot and ministered to my body, which is now more blue & purple than anything else. She gathered every medication or ointment I could possibly need and placed them beside my bed. She brought pillows for under my ankle and for my head’s softball-sized lump. She even fired up some Reiki music and we did a joint Reiki session on my wracked body.
It should be noted that, during all this and for the last week or so, Melanie has been dealing with her own body’s issue: a wicked case of poison ivy. She has been treating one patch only to watch another emerge. One of the things she was picking up at the hardware store was acetone to treat the oil that spreads poison ivy. She didn’t even get to do that until much, much later in the day when I was all settled. Anybody who knows Melanie knows that she is a wonderful care-taker, and I know that during the time I heal from my severely sprained ankle, she will be there with whatever it is I need. And she will do it all without complaint. “You call me if you need anything during the night,” she said, and I promised to do so. (Then I noticed that I wouldn’t be able to do anything myself anyway, as she had sneakily put the crutches against the wall across the room instead of next to my bed.) “You did it for me,” she reminded me, remembering when she had knee replacement surgery and I was cast into the role of nurse. And she’d done it for me through two other ankle surgeries and a pretty good concussion. We’ve always been there for each other, no matter what a day might bring.
In keeping with the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad theme, here’s how our day started before any of this emergency room drama commenced …
I was looking out my bedroom window admiring another beautiful day outside when I heard Melanie shriek “Oh my god, there’s water all over the kitchen floor.” I jumped up, hoping she was exaggerating, but she wasn’t. We mopped up about an inch of standing water (lucky we have tile floors), still not knowing its source. After much investigation, we noticed a trail of mist that eventually led to behind the refrigerator. Turns out the hose to the ice maker (which isn’t even hooked up) had sprung a leak overnight. I turned off the water line and more mopping and cleaning rendered the first emergency of the day successfully handled.
At that point, we didn’t have any idea what else was in store on this day. But we now know (again) that whatever the crisis is, we can handle it. Together. We just do whatever it takes. It’s who we are.
And we’re still very happy. Even though there are difficulties, we are facing them in a beautiful place.
Pura vida.