TRIGGER WARNING: This piece contains some graphic descriptions of a horrible compound fracture.
March 17, 2018
Tonight, I am existing exactly one moon cycle after the moment I received a mind-blowing message. Bigger than any I’ve ever received while in deep meditation or during any peak of any psychedelic trip I’ve ever been on (and let me tell you, some of those were so colossal: 25 years later, I still I remember them in detail). It was the moment my body weight shifted and twisted beyond the limits of my right tibia and the bone snapped, a large part of it disconnecting from the rest of my body’s skeletal system, making a quick break for the outside. Before this moment, I had been preparing to help my partner, Sean, pack up for the night. I had spent 4 beautiful hours listening to him play and sing and entertain at a restaurant on the beach and now I was sitting on the edge of a tiny stage, being told not to look down by Sean and the general manager, as patrons gathered with camera phones, centering and zooming in on twisted leg and dangling foot that clung to shards of bone. For a moment, I worried more about Sean bloodying someone’s nose than the feeling of blood (is that blood???) dripping down my leg.
I was in Broward County. My primary care doctor was 25 miles away. For the first time in my life, I had an HMO, and that made me nervous. I was being lifted into an ambulance and telling Sean I loved him. A police officer sat next to me once I was inside and asked me about my night; specifically, how much did I have to drink? Had I eaten anything? I had had 2 cocktails. I hadn’t finished with the third, which was going to be my last of the evening. I had eaten dinner and I had been drinking water as well. This satisfied her and the next news I heard was that I being transported to Holy Cross. That was the hospital where my aunt died. My mind began to flip through facts like a magazine in a wind storm: pictures and strings of words lingering as the pages rapidly passed. My aunt with wrinkles, a permanent tan and a frequent, cackling laugh; she lived on the intra-coastal in Ft. Lauderdale and smoked cigarettes (was there a brand called “Vantage?”) and she died of emphysema. That’s called COPD now. She died at Holy Cross and wait–was there anything else I knew about this hospital? Yes. I remembered reading about Holy Cross being one of the best hospitals in Florida and repeated this to myself as one EMT lunged at my veins with a needle to start an IV and another asked my permission to place stickers on my breasts and they both made jokes about me dancing on the stage. “That’s not what happened,” I snarled and they laughed and I wanted to punch them. Hard.
The windows on the rear doors were in the shape of a crisscross. A holy cross. Sixteen years ago, the last time I’d been in an ambulance, the windows made one also. The one that took me from a trauma hospital to a NICU hospital after my accident when I was 5.5 months pregnant and scared, but someone who loved me was following the ambulance. I pretended Sean was following this ambulance and then realized he was actually waiting at the valet for his car and he didn’t know how to get to Holy Cross. He grew up in West Palm Beach and any navigation in this area was done by me and it’s Saturday night in ER in a pretty crazy city during tourist season where I could get lost amid the maniacs and someone could very easily steal my kidneys and then I saw headlights and yes, that had to be Sean, he was following me and everything was going to be ok and the 12 inch square pillow I was resting on became an angora cloud and then the stab-y EMT I had named Macbeth looked at me and said, “Kristie, I just gave you some morphine so your leg should be starting to feel better, ok?”
Then I was in ER and as it turned out, I was the crazy person on the Saturday night screaming expletives when they repositioned my leg. Then the x-ray room, where the radiology tech told me I was “fucking awesome” because I wasn’t screaming in pain, and then the very serious faces of doctors who looked at my leg and I heard words like “compound” and “trauma wound” and “rod and screws” and “emergency surgery.” This was where Sean arrived and I moved into the inconsolable crying phase. I wasn’t just crying about my leg. My leg was going to get better at some point and in about month, I would be processing the trauma, as well as passing by the dark room in my head, sometimes peaking inside but instead shopping a lot on Zulily and buying The Sims 2. I was crying because when my tibia snapped like a pretzel, another, louder and messier break was happening. After years of failing to create healthy boundaries and recognize cues and instead, taking on the role of a hot and cold introvert who was just too much for many, me included sometimes, the fault line had finally cracked and I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do.
The next day I had a rod bolted into my leg by a kind surgeon who promised me I would run on my leg again. I stayed in Holy Cross for 2 more days and received first-rate care. If we are allowed one “good” hospital stay, then I must ensure I stay in optimal health for the rest of my life. I was reprimanded by a young Haitian nurse because I was not using my pain pump enough. She told me the pump was there because this type of pain is bad for me. She then made a joke about President’s Day and what happens this year when we don’t have a president and we laughed and she told me to press the pump.
I’ve been thinking about that interaction a lot. This woman looked through me when she admonished me for not accessing the morphine on the other end of my IV. It was as if she were asking me, “In what other areas do you allow pain to linger because you are afraid of what is on the other side?” I was afraid. I was afraid of addiction and itching and constipation and those fears were real, but it was more important at that moment that I get in front of pain from a major surgical procedure.
So as I’m here, relying on another person for a lot of things, I’m wondering if this is the breakdown I knew would be coming around this time. Forty-seven and a half seems like the perfect age for one and maybe all it will take is one little turn in the wrong direction and I will go spiraling into space with no 9 mm rod to hold me still. I’ve been doubting my abilities as a teacher, a partner, a mother, a sister, a friend, a writer (especially that), and questioning my choices to the point where I’m pretty much convinced I’m doing it wrong. And when I say “it,” I mean “everything.” I’ve been uncovering memories of times I felt incompetent or humiliated, dreams about places I’ve been where I’ve felt unsafe, places where the bullies reigned and I’m trying to pack my suitcase to return home.
Or what if this isn’t a psychotic break, but a break from the rut that’s become my forties? As my foot flapped in the breeze (to quote my surgeon) on that stage one month ago, what if I missed the universe whispering, “It’s up to you what happens next.” Seeing as how this is the first thing I have written in 2018, I should probably get to work. This type of rut is bad for me, but writing clears up murky places so that the insurmountable is better managed. Perhaps something is urging me to explore the dreams where I’m constantly packing; the memories of as a child feeling so insecure, I thought I was eating dinner the wrong way; the paranoia that developed from not establishing boundaries; the silence that encompassed me when screaming would have been more appropriate. I’d love to let that nurse know that tonight, I have pressed the pump.
Apocalyptic Picnic 