I turned my face to the side to see a pair of legs appear in
the middle of the street. I let my head rest on the edge of the curb, watching
blood drip over the edge into the gutter.
“Oh, my word,” someone said, “call nine one one.”
Judith had a hand on my arm and she was crying. “Oh, Don!
Oh, God!”
I could remember tripping, my left shoe getting caught
between my right shoe and the curbing as it swung forward, and in the next
instant my face smashing into the curb. I didn’t remember falling.
Judith tugged on my arm. “Can you sit up?”
“No,” I answered, “I want to stay here for a minute.”
“Okay. Let me have your glasses.” Then she said she was
going to get something for the blood. I could see that a small crowd had gathered
in the street, everybody talking. One pair of legs ended in bare feet, with
bright red toenails. With some effort I turned my head enough to see people’s
faces, some I recognized as our neighbors. Blood continued to drip profusely
into the gutter.
We had begun a morning walk with a bright sun and a mild
breeze. Judith loves to get out on mornings like that for a walk around the
neighborhood. The temperature was about seventy degrees, and I had breathed
deeply as we started out. We were about a block from home when I tripped.
It happened so fast! One instant we were walking, and then
the next instant I was on the pavement, my face feeling the rough concrete and
pebbles.
Soon Judith returned, breathing hard from running. She
handed me a small towel , and I held it against my face. I heard someone say,
“Here they come.”
I looked back up the street to see two men approaching,
carrying heavy bags over their shoulders. I wondered where they came from.
Close to me, they began asking me questions. “Did you faint?” I said no. “Any
difficulty moving your feet or your hands?” No. “Can you sit up?”
Still holding the towel to my dripping nose, I struggled to
sit up on the curb. Somebody gave me a hand, and in a moment I was upright. One
of the men opened his bag, took out a blood pressure monitor, and wrapped the
cuff around my arm. “That hurt?” No. “Do you know your normal blood pressure?”
About one fifty.
When he finished, he said, “One fifty two over ninety.” We
agreed that that was good, and he removed the cuff. I showed him my finger,
which I had noticed was badly torn open somehow. He wrapped a Band-Aid around
it. “Have somebody look at that. It’ll probably need some stitches.”
I looked around at the people nearby, nodding when they
spoke to me, but my mind was still foggy. I heard somebody say that the
ambulance was on its way, and somebody else say it wasn’t necessary. I think
that was Judith. “I’ll take him to the urgent care,” she said. “I’ll get the
car.”
The emergency crew waited for her to drive up to us, then
one of them took my arm as I struggled to stand. I felt someone else grasp my
other arm, and they supported me while I made my way to Judith’s car. One
opened the door for me. “Thank you,” I said.
“No problem,” he replied. I thought of all the times I had
seen the EMT trucks in our community. Ours is a co-op with 350 residence units,
all of which are owned by people over 50 years of age. Emergencies are more
common than in most neighborhoods.
The crowd was still standing there as we drove away, passing
the big fire truck that was parked a couple of doors down, its engine idling
loudly. I hadn’t seen the truck arrive.
I was feeling pampered. My forehead and nose ached, and I
was still dripping blood into the towel. Judith handed me a face mask. “I
remembered our masks, at least,” she said. We’d been walking without covid
masks, as we usually do since there are seldom very many people out on the
streets.
“I can’t put it on this way,” I said, with the mask in one
hand and still holding the towel to my face with the other.
When we pulled up at the urgent care office, it was closed.
“It’s Saturday morning,” she said. “Why are they closed? The sign says they
should be open.”
We sat there for a moment, and then I remembered that there
was another urgent care facility a few blocks away. When we got there, it was
also closed. “Because of covid,” a sign said. Judith took out her phone and Googled
for other nearby facilities. Finding one in Brighton, about twenty minutes
away, she called them and found that they were open.
Inside, there was one other patient in the waiting room, but
when they saw me they immediately escorted me to a treatment room, where they
directed me to sit on an examining table. The bleeding had all but stopped.
A doctor came in and began inspecting my face. “Are you on a
blood thinner?” No.
He gently mopped my abrasions with alcohol-soaked gauze,
then with a glue dispenser touched several places on my face and glued together
the torn finger. He said he needed to sew up my lip, and brought a kit over to
me. “Lie down,” he said.
Other than a sharp poke with a thin lidocaine needle, the procedure
was painless. He took only a single stitch with a very fine suture. “In a week,
have your primary care doctor remove the stitch, or come back here and we’ll do
it,” he said. “You can take Tylenol or something similar if you need it.”
Turning to the door, he said “You’re all set. Wait here for
the nurse.”
The nurse came in and took my blood pressure. “One
thirty-four over eighty,” she said. “That’s better than you got from the EMT,
isn’t it?” She gave me a sheet of paper with details of the visit, and escorted
me to the exit. “Your wife is waiting in the car,” she said. “I hope you have a
better day from here on.” She smiled and held the door for me.
I put on a mask and went out to the car.
Later, Judith took a photograph of my face to show me the
extent of my purple “raccoon eyes.” My forehead, nose and upper lip were badly
swollen.
“But my glasses were not even broken,” I remarked. Indeed,
they didn’t even show a scratch.
My face after two days
