Two days after Christmas, 2016, late in the day, I got off the bus at the corner and walked toward my Brooklyn house. Almost there, I tripped, caught my toe on an unevenness in the sidewalk, rocked forward on my rocker soles and went face and hands first into the pavement.
I remember trying to stop myself by flexing and digging in my toes. I remember realizing that nothing I could do would stop my fall. I don’t remember the impact. I had no sense of putting my hands out to catch myself.
I had tripped and fallen like that once 10 years earlier, in another part of the same city. It had been painful, but I hadn’t suffered permanent damage. I was hopeful that this fall would be similar, that I’d have a few days or weeks of swelling and bruising but be basically ok. But I then I found I couldn’t put my weight on my hands to push myself back up. My son was with me. I sent him home to get his father.
Once they’d helped me home and I tried to wash my bruised and bleeding hands, I knew my next stop was the ER. My wrists looked like puffy cylinders, hands swollen from my knuckles down.
I summoned an Uber or Lyft somehow. I told my son he had to come with me because I couldn’t use my hands.
I didn’t realize how bad I looked until later. I knew my nose was bleeding. I didn’t know the fall had driven my glasses deep into the bridge of my nose. I didn’t know that my nose was broken or that I had a shallow but large scrape on my forehead that was bleeding profusely. I was more concerned with my missing wrists.
The ER was such a relief. Finally there were people who knew what to do, who could manage my increasingly unmanageable injuries. It didn’t all depend on me and my ability to stay rational. They cut my shirt off and turned it into a kind of poncho. They removed my wedding rings without using a chisel or bolt cutter. They injected me with morphine. They got me x-rayed--yup, both wrists broken and would need surgery. They took me for a CT scan for my skull--a tall tech with giant fingers competently removed my delicate earrings and necklace without hurting me. No concussion, just that broken and gashed nose and messy forehead wound.
In short, I was a mess, but not that worried about it because I was full of morphine. The nurses cleaned up my face and put clumsy splints on my arms to keep my non-wrists in place. My jewelry was tucked in a plastic biohazard bag, where it would stay for several months.
I was there for 3 hours before they told me I had to go to Manhattan because there was no orthopedist on call in Brooklyn and the fractures needed to be reduced. They gave me a morphine lock, a port in my arm where they could easily top up the painkiller as necessary. I told my son to go back home and tell his dad I would be gone for a while but everything was going to be OK.
I took a cinematic ambulance ride over the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan. I was delivered to the door of the NYU Langone ER on First Avenue and East 32nd St. After that, things got surreal.
The ER was full because there was a nasty stomach bug going around and people were coming in to be treated for vomiting and dehydration. I spent much of the next few hours worrying that I would catch the stomach bug. I couldn’t figure out how I was going to puke successfully if I couldn’t hold the basin. (I didn’t get sick.)
The orthopedic resident on call came to reduce the fractures. “Reduce” sounds like an innocent word, right? What happened was they gave me more morphine and then the doctor unwrapped my splints and pulled on my hands, wrists and forearms to get the bones back into approximately the right place.
I am not a complainer or a whiner but even I was driven to say things like OW and PLEASE STOP and THAT HURTS and THIS IS NO FUN. He was super nice about everything. He explained what he was going to do and answered all my woozy questions before he embarked on the torture. Afterward I asked him why he had decided to specialize in orthopedics and he said it was because you got to fix people and they stayed fixed. Or I could have made that up, but it’s a nice thought.
I was in my alcove all night. I kind of slept, but I was also aware of people coming into the ER to be triaged--I was just a curtain away from where they sat people down to interview them. So many young men in NYC think they are having heart attacks, though I suspect it was actually indigestion or too much cocaine.
Around 6 am a doctor came to talk to me and I told him I was done having a stiff upper lip and burst into tears for the first time. He and the other person there (A nurse? An aide? I don’t know) were very sympathetic. The idea was they were going to admit me to the hospital but they were having trouble finding a bed. They needed my alcove for someone sicker so they moved me, still in my bed, out into a hallway, just outside the isolation ward where there was a patient who possibly had chickenpox (I reassured myself that since I had chickenpox as a child, this was probably just going to bump up my immunity).
I lay there for several hours, fuzzed out on pain meds and watching the ER desk, thinking that this was why they set TV shows in hospitals. So much DRAMA. At intervals someone would give me a cup of ice water with a straw and another oxycodone. At one point I asked to get up and go to the bathroom, and discovered I was still wearing my shoes. I had been lying on various beds and stretchers, fully clothed, all night, and hadn’t noticed till then.
They gave up on finding me a bed by the late afternoon. My husband arrived to take me home. We were interviewed by a social worker who explained that I shouldn’t go anywhere by myself--indoors or out--especially stairs--because if I fell again I wouldn’t be able to catch myself.
Broken wrists have few advantages, but I would prefer it to a broken leg or ankle because you are mobile. You can get around on your own power. The disadvantage, of course, is that you can’t use your hands. You can’t manipulate doorknobs. You can’t unbutton your clothes. You can’t wipe your own butt. Someone has to feed you, because you can’t hold a fork. A person without hands needs a lot of attention.
Once home, I was so happy to get something to eat--I hadn’t eaten since lunch the previous day. I drank chicken soup through a straw. Such bliss!
More to come …
Ugh! How horrible , start to finish. however your experience could definitely be a storyline on The Pitt.
Thanks for sharing this, if only because it certainly gave me gratitude that my particular hand problems (although unfixable) did not accompany such pain or difficulties. It also reinforced my decision after I tripped on an uneven side walk about 10 years ago (with only bad scrape and sprain) that I would walk as much as I could in the actual street, not on the sidewalk. In our neighborhood the sidewalks have been pushed up by tree roots, and are a constant trip hazard. On the other hand the streets I walk on are not busy, and if I walk near the sidewalk, facing oncoming traffic, I have a lot of time to step up on the curb or between parked cars if a car comes. And I don't have to spend the whole walk looking down at my feet!