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Health & Fitness

The Pickleball Chronicles: Part II

This is what happened when I went to the ER after the Great Pickleball Fiasco.

Last week I described in (painful) detail the way I was able to injure myself by playing a sport (pickleball) designed for people with limited mobility.  (But, apparently, maximum coordination.) What I failed to describe, however, is what I was wearing, which is an essential detail in picturing the whole fiasco accurately. You might picture me wearing something passably athletic, since I was in public playing an athletic game.  You’d be wrong.  No, although I was wearing high quality running shoes and athletic socks, the rest of my outfit consisted of an old bathing suit bought years ago in an “It’s December and Please, Please Get Those Bathing Suits Off Our Hands” sale.  On top of the bathing suit was a schmatta.  For those unfamiliar with the term, schmatta is one of those incredibly useful but difficult to define Yiddish words.  It literally translates to something like “rag” but is generally used to describe a rag like garment.  Shapeless dresses, an old moth eaten sweater , your favorite sweat pants: these are all schmattas.  Mine was a formless bathing suit cover-up, gauzy and semi-see through, and bedecked with sequins.  So, you can imagine I looked stunning.  Stunning as in “It is stunning that a grown woman would allow herself to be seen out of doors wearing that getup.”

When we last left off with the story, my swollen and misshapen wrist made a holiday trip (December 22nd) to the ER inevitable.  My dad drove me back to his house in the golf cart so my husband could take me to the ER in a real street-legal car. Eventually, after some stress-related screaming at each other by the adults I am related to by blood and/or marriage, I was loaded into the car and we headed off to the nearest hospital, which was about 15 minutes away from my parents house. We found the hospital easily enough, due to directions from my dad and the G.P.S.  The entrance to the ER was not so easy to find.  We ended up going into the hospital complex by a weird entrance probably made for service vehicles only.  There were signs pointing towards the ER, but they seemed to send us down ridiculous winding switchback paths through the parking lot mapped out by the same guys who make the waiting line for rides in amusement parks.  Naturally, every six feet or so every was what felt like a speed mountain instead of a speed bump.     
The speed bumps made me yelp, because they jostled my wrist.  Every time I yelped my poor husband thought it was a comment on the smoothness of his driving, which I guess it was.  This made him bark.  Between the yelping and the barking, any observers probably thought we were heading to the insane asylum, or the veterinary hospital. At that point I would have settled for the pound so long as they had heavy duty pain killers designed for Great Danes.           
Eventually, after as much driving in the parking lot as on the roadway, we got to the Lee Memorial Hospital.  They called me back before the sign-in paperwork was finished and I had to get my husband to finish it up.  As you can imagine, he attempted to put up a fight but I then showed him my arm and he shut up and continued.           
The triage nurse sat me in a room and took my vitals and typed them into a computer.  I noticed he kept typing the word “deformity”.  I will grant you the word was accurately descriptive, but it felt the same as if he typed the similarly descriptive “middle aged woman wearing bizarre getup and enough extra weight to feed the Donner party for a week.”             
Eventually they set me in a chair in the middle of the hallway.  I assumed this was because the rooms were full, but it might also be because it made it easier for the hospital staff to say something like, “check out the crazy deformed woman on hallway 3" to each other than “find an excuse to go into exam room 2 to check out the whacko in there.”             

After some failed experiments with pulling and grease, it was determined that my wedding and engagement ring would have to be cut off.  By this time my husband had finished the sign in paper work and had found his way to my hallway just as the guy was putting together the hospital grade Dremel tool.   I guess my husband’s brain entertained itself by worrying about an imaginary object instead of his injured wife, and he insisted on placing a piece of paper under my hand to catch any platinum dust.  He then got into a heated debate with the Dremel tool operator about the proper way to cut a ring.  This resulted in his leaving the emergency room under questionable circumstances. I’m not mad at him, by the way.  I’m actually sort of flattered in a twisted way that seeing me injured made him act as crazy as I looked.           

Then it was off to the x-ray room.  The x-ray tech wanted me to lay down my arm on the plate in different positions.  I could not move or twist my arm in the ways she wanted me to.  As a result, I kept my arm stiff and moved and twisted my body so that my arm could be in the place she wanted it to be.  This weirdo yoga compared with the fact that I was not technically wearing any pants would have made for an entertaining video which thankfully does not exist.  (To my knowledge it doesn’t exist, but there’s probably  a security video somewhere that the nurses watch during their lunch breaks to make themselves laugh.)             

By the time I got back to my hallway suite, the x-ray had already been e-mailed over and I was given the precise medical diagnosis of “oof, you really did a number on yourself.”  I looked at the screen.  Normally, when I look at x-rays it is similar to when I look at early term sonograms.  I believe you when you tell me what it shows, but I can’t see it for myself. This however was obvious. The top of my radius was cracked and shifted over and little spiky bones were coming out of the sides.  My arm was then splinted and I was sent home in a Vicodin induced haze with instructions to see an orthopedic doctor ASAP.         

Merry Christmas to me, eh?

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