I actually felt good yesterday. After the weekend away with a healing session, the prospect of learning the practice next week, legs limber and edema-free (if weak), I even had some bounce when I walked out of the bathroom.
It wasn't anywhere near a swan dive. Not even a faceplant. Just an ohfuckmethisisgonnahurt as I lost it on the top step and toppled down the metal staircase toward the tile landing.
I did miss the stairs themselves, mainly. And my landing grunt wasn't loud enough to rouse any of the classrooms. I was able to stand up and gimp into the library, where I fell into blubbering while my left elbow—the one that's been broken and chipped already, the side of the broken thumb, collar bone, sprained ankle, sprained wrist—began throbbing and swelling in equal measure, although the pain soon pulled ahead in the camel race.
Once I was composed enough, I gimped up to my boss's office: something wrong with a leg, too. “Fell down the staircase. Going to the hospital.”
“You okay, man? Need a ride?”
“No, I'm okay to drive. Please let Teacher Brooke know I'll be gone. I'll leave a DVD of the final exam for Teacher Lakhona.”
Heh, okay to drive. Visions of my not inconveniencing anyone popped: the pain camel made it to the end and popped the balloon first. I was starting to gray out.
“Boss? Gonna need a ride. I'm at your truck.”
I cried and bellyached all the way to the hospital—the helplessness of falling apart coupled with the inconvenience of covering my weaknesses compounded by falling apart in a country on the far side of the world where my support group consists of the very people for whom, back home, I would hold the stiff upper pucker, as it were.
Now here I am, two months in-country, on about the tenth visit to the hospital, this time driven by my boss for what's promising to be my third physiology-altering accident.
He drops me off and returns to find me in the ER staging area. But then a nurse takes me to the packed waiting room and waves for me to sit to be weighed and pulsed. I promise to call with results and for a ride back and my boss splits.
At first, I failed the BP test—too low. So I sat up and got angry and things spiked: 88/58, pulse up to 66. Temperature normal but I've lost weight. Damn.
She waves me to another nurse, who says, “Surgeon doctor come see you soon.”
“Surgeon? Surgeon? Mai, mai, mai surgery. Jeb. Jeb jeb. Big pain,” pointing to the elbow tucked into my side.
She nods and waves for me to sit not in the waiting area but in one of the comfy chairs just outside the doctors' office bank, where typically you sit for extremely short-term stagings. Good news.
The throbbing caught up and popped the other balloon after about 30, maybe 40 minutes. I'm not too sure. I was going gray, had been for a while, and then I was out, and then another nurse was there with a bitty little safety cup of water.
“Surgeon doctor be half an hour.”
I guess I was out for a while, because the clock said an hour had elapsed. I started getting angry. “Jeb! Tablet? Something? I HURT!”
An angry farang in the waiting room, yelling about pain in a horrible accent, turns out to be some great motivation. I was in the ER, trying to talk with a doc, in under a minute.
When it gets down to it, you'd think an ashen-faced person pointing and saying, “pain, pain PAIN!” would get the message across. But this guy is reading my chart. I might be the first farang he's seen come walking in, or the first farang he's seen with a record at the hospital. Or maybe he's just that sort of guy.
He started out pointing at my weight: too low.
Right. We've been here.
So we go through my history, and the questions roll like the Miranda Rights from a cop approaching retirement: an exact repeat of the transcriptions in front of him, save that now the edemas have subsided, with, “Oh, hmmm, hmm, protein... loosing, protein-loosing... en, en, enter, enter-o-pa-ty; protein-losing enteropathy, hmmm, hmmmm.” Finally he comes to the present page, which has my sketch of a staircase with acceleration lines leading to a splat.
He points to his head, “Jeb, mai?” Pain in the head?
“Mai,” no, but I'm ready to hurt the greased coif.
Then the neck.
No.
Then the head.
“Trauma to the lateral side of the left ulnar tuberosity, minor contusion to the lateral side of the right radius.”
He looks at me and I hand him my elbow. “Jeb.”
He pats his ribs, his stomach, “Jeb, mai?”
“Mai. Jeb,” I wiggle my elbow.
He pokes the various bones and muscles and finds the lateral side of the tuberosity, where the tendons from the forearm connect. “JEB!”
I start browning out while waiting for the X-ray, haze off after getting waved back to the hot, crowded sitting area. Meditate: focus on the breath, in and out and in and out. Focus. Acknowledge the pain but let it pass. Concentrate on the airflow.
A nurse comes up and takes me back to the ER, where the doc has my elbow up on his vertically-oriented widescreen monitor.
“No broken. Sprained in tendon, bruised in bone.” He waves for my right arm. “Same same: bruised in bone.” And then he waves me to a gurney, which I hate. During the last significant procedures, the array of IV and vital sign monitors, plus the heft of the auto recline features, made the gurneys look less obviously like corpse transport. Nothing hiding the Thai version, or the neighbors who are bleeding profusely inside rings of nurses. Did I forget to mention that it's an open ER and there are three patients with sundry gore hanging out? It helps the ambience, really.
Despite the stir of climbing up with shoes on, they get me situated on the gurney and begin the poke-n-prod.
Head: rock hard.
Neck: intact.
Ribs: protrude *wince* and are tender.
DON'T TOUCH THE LEFT ARM.
Right arm: distal tenderness.
Abdomen: “You need eat more.” Old abrasion from the bike wreck. New minor abrasion from the stairs. Who knew?
Left leg: intact.
Right leg: intact, intact, oh. Abrasion the length of the tibia. Huh. Who knew? Much ado about cleaning and closing it, and an inch-thick gauze shinguard before they release me. And I'm still waiting for pain medication.
“Okay, you good go home!” says the doc.
“Pain medicine. Please. Pain. Tablet.”
“Oh, you hurting? Okay.”
And with that, I went home. My boss picked me up, I picked up my computer, and went home to a movie I bought from a discount counter: Me and the Ugly Duckling, by a Scandahoovian group reminiscent of Pixar before they went Disney. Great movie.
Took a nap from 3-5, went to bed at 6:30, woke up with the neighbor at 4:45.
And today I am functional. Hurt like hell, and I'm beyond sick and tired of hurting, but I'm functional. Here's hoping my body kicks in before the drugs give out.
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