On
February 11 at about 3pm in the afternoon my wife and I made a fateful decision
that would effect the rest of our lives together. It was a cold afternoon. The
temperature was somewhere around 16ºF. The wind made it feel like 7ºF. We had
been to visit the Peabody Essex Museum’s Impressionists
on the Water. We had lunch at Rocafella’s. I had a chicken breast stuffed
with artichoke and coated with maple syrup. The waitress wanted to know what I
thought of the coating. I told her I liked it. That was a lie. It was too
sweet. But I never tell wait staff what I really think. Why would I want to
make them uncomfortable? What are they going to do about it? What could anybody
who gets paid $2.13 an hour do about it?
After
lunch we walked back to the open-air garage. My car was on the top floor. We
entered the building and were immediately presented with a decision.
“Shall
we walk up or take the elevator?” Nancy asked.
“Let’s
walk,” I said. “It’s better for us.”
Boy,
was I ever wrong.
I
made short work of the five flights. But as soon I stepped through the doorway
out onto the roof, fate made its cruel and unexpected move. There was a curb
just beyond the doorway. It never occurred to me that one would be there. Why would it? It wasn’t as if there was a sidewalk and a street. The architect
wanted that extra step. Who put that idea into his or her head? Who knows how
long that curb had been lying there in wait for me? It doesn’t matter. I missed the curb and instantly
lost my balance. I lurched forward. I tried to run in a vain effort to get my
legs back under my torso where they belonged. All I succeeded in doing was
driving my left arm and shoulder even harder into the concrete floor.
I
could feel something warm running across my forehead, behind my ear and into my
hair. It turned out to be blood from a gash over my left eye. My left arm was
completely numb. I raised it as if I were giving a Nazi salute to the sky, all
the while yelling, “My arm. My arm. I can’t feel my arm.”
Three
women were just ahead of me. They saw it all happening. I think of them now as
Norns. They kept chanting, “Shall we call 911? Shall we call 911?”
Nancy
said no, but they called anyway. I could hear one of them say into her
cellphone, “I’m a bystander.”
It sounded to my half-working ears like a political statement.
I
asked the Norns what I should do about the blood on the floor. They told me not
to worry.
“The
rain will wash everything away,” they said like good Norns would.
“They
don’t think I’m taking this seriously enough,” Nancy said as she drove me to
the infirmary at MIT.
Yesterday,
I had day surgery at Mt. Auburn Hospital. It turned out I had broken the 3rd metacarpal in my left
hand. The hospital staff, the surgeon,
the anesthesiologist, the anesthesia nurses, the operating room techs and surgical
nurses, the clerks who took my Medicare and Medicaid numbers—in other words,
everybody I came in contact with at that hospital was marvelous. I mean here it is the day after surgery and I’m typing with
both hands.
I
remember two things about my blood pressure. On the Friday three days before the operation the pre-surgical nurse
took my blood pressure. She put the cuff
on my left arm, the one that was hurt. She said my BP was a bit high. It was 139
over 86. She seemed a bit concerned. I said I could fix that. She put the cuff on my right arm. I
meditated. This time the BP was 120 over 72.
“That
was awesome,” she exclaimed. I am pretty sure she was impressed.
“Will
I become a hospital legend?” I asked.
“No,”
she said. “A lot of people can do that.”
When
I was wheeled into the operating room on Tuesday morning, my blood pressure was
200 over something. Nothing awesome I could do then. They weren’t bothered.
As I
rolled into the room, I was making small talk to make myself feel better. I said I got the impression from watching Grey's Anatomy on TV that all doctors and nurses in a hospital slept around
and that the patients either got better or died. The anesthesiologist said that
the program got the medicine wrong, but everything else was accurate.
“Only
nobody sleeps with the patients,” I remember saying. Then someone put a mask over my face and then
someone said, “It’s all over.”
And,
indeed, it was.
Here
are the results. You can see the break in the photo on the left. Just click on the picture. Do the same on the right. You can see three screws putting
the bone back together. It
looks like a solid bone with three screws in it. I mean how good can you get?
 |
| Broken 3rd metacarpal on my left hand |
 |
| Rebuilt 3rd metacarpal |
I said at the start that my decision to walk up the steps rather than take the elevator would effect my wife and me for the rest of our lives. What was I thinking of?
Airport metal detectors. What a drag!
