Thank the gods for helpful friends, small blessings, and little grey pills. Those were pretty much the thoughts on my mind when the figurative dust settled and I was alone in the dark in my hospital bed. Nothing’s so bad it couldn’t be a whole lot worse.
My otherwise very cool headed horse spooked and bolted, bucking. I found myself testing gravity which turned out to be working as intended. As I hit the ground my first thought was, at least it’s dry; landing in mud isn’t all that pleasant, particularly not in winter. No, actually, that was my second thought. My first went something like, OH PINEAPPLING CRANBERRY, this is going to HURT!
It did. For about thirty seconds everything in creation revolved around trying to breathe in spite of my lungs trying to escape through my abdomen.
I managed to roll onto my back and noticed out of the corner of my eye that my arm didn’t roll along. Dislocated shoulder, fantastic. I was immediately reminded of stories about how much it hurts to have a shoulder pushed back in place. Then I realized that I could not move my arm and mentally added broken arm to the list.
My recollection of the next minutes are a little hazy. Somebody caught my horse and returned her to pasture. Somebody called an ambulance. The ambulance guys poked me everywhere to check for spinal damage and waved fingers in my face to test for concussions. A lot of bad jokes were made because laughter sure is preferable to crying. The ambulance guy gave me a shot of morphine before loading me onto the stretcher, and another before we drove off on the dirt road, the oh so bumpy dirt road. Somewhere in the middle of this my shoulder snapped back in place, but thank you, sweet morphine, I didn’t notice. I got a third shot before x-rays so that I didn’t try to kill the radiology nurses for moving my arm around.
Now I sit typing with my left hand only and thank the powers that be for helpful friends. Everything is difficult in my drugged state, and people have stepped up all over to offer assistance. At times like this one remembers how important it is to have a solid network of friends, how important it is to be part of a community where helping each other out is the natural choice.