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Friday, May 16, 2003
Damn. Well, Jesus Christ. I got hit by a fucking car. I'm basically fine, as far as the medical staff at Pennsylvania Hospital can tell. (I think my headache and the pain in my right eye are alarming, but they don't.) It's mostly just bruises and stiff joints. They did check my eyes, and shone bright lights into them, and said they didn't see anything like swelling or a hemmorhage, so I guess they're okay. Just kind of...shocked. I didn't get hit hard or full-on. I was hurrying to catch a bus, and wanted to cross a street. A car was coming, but I figured that, since it had a stop sign, it would stop. Nope, it did one of those two-mile-an-hour "rolling stops," the kind where drivers slow down but don't actually stop all the way and cruise right through the intersection. I, not very brightly, kept going, thinking it would at least stop when I got in front of it; nope. The fender hit my left hip, I fell down on my right side, then fell back on my left side. To her credit, the driver did stop then, and asked (sounding more annoyed than anything else) if I was all right; I felt okay (from sheer adrenaline and shock, probably), and just said "I'm fine, I want to catch that bus." (No, it didn't occur to me to get her name or license plate or anything.) The bus driver, to his credit, waited for me, and also asked if I was okay. I said I was. Got to my stop, walked to the office, walked in, said "I got hit by a car," and asked if there was anyplace I could go to freak out in private; the shock was wearing off and I knew I needed a place where I could just break down and cry. My boss also asked if I was okay; I said "I think so." (Yes, the doubt was finally creeping in.) He said there were some empty rooms on the second floor (we're on the first story of a rowhouse), so I went up there and closed a door and had a fifteen-minute silent-crying-and-screaming jag. Went back downstairs, said I felt okay, and started working. I was sore and stiff, but that wasn't too bad; then I started feeling dizzy, and my right eye hurt, and I kept forgetting things: I thought I'd done something, then looked back and saw that I hadn't; someone asked me a question about something I've been doing for two years and I didn't immediately remember how to do it, and when I did I had trouble getting the words right to explain it. And at that point I decided that I should go to a hospital. I didn't think there was anything really wrong, but I figured it was much better to get checked out than ignore it and wind up in more trouble later. I was going to call 911, but my boss said he'd drive me. So we went there—I kept apologizing for missing work, and actually said "I'm sorry I got hit by a car"; he said he didn't care if I missed work, he just wanted me to be okay. We got to the hospital and I did the whole sign-in-and-wait triage thing. I kept saying "I thought I was fine but I just feel kind of weird." Like I didn't want to bother anyone, like I was embarrassed about coming there without an obvious major trauma. Like I'd be wasting their time. Still: head injuries are not good, and I wanted to make sure I didn't have one. I got checked by a nurse, and then by a resident, and then by a doctor, and then the resident came back and finished up. As I said at the beginning of this post, they said I was basically fine; just bruised and shaken up. They offered to write..."write a note" sounds so grade-school...well, write something official to tell my boss I didn't have to go back to work. But I decided to go back. Went outside—it had just started raining and getting really windy—got a cab (staying well out of the way of other cars) and went back to the office. I told everyone I was, yes, basically fine, and asked them to keep an eye on me in case I started acting strange or forgetting who I was or falling down or anything. J., of course, has been rattled by all this; although we usually just e-mail when we're at work, we talked on the phone three times so far—once when I first got into work, once when I was at the hospital, and once when I got back to the office. He told me to take care of myself and not work too hard and if I felt any worse let someone know, rather than just keep it to myself because I didn't want to bother anyone. (That's one of my real flaws: I hate to bother people, even if it's completely justified, as in, "Hey, I just got hit by a car!") I forewent my usual healthy lunch for some nice hot Chinese food: hot-and-sour soup and General Tso's chicken. I'm doing some quiet, steady, mostly easy work (just making some corrections to the almost-final version of a manuscript). The headache and dizziness and eye pain have mostly subsided, but my bruises are starting to hurt more. My left shoulder, in particular, has some really sharp pain. Oh well; I guess they'll keep getting worse until they reach their full purple bloom, then go into a slow yellow decline. (Lovely imagery, I know.) The moral of the story is: Waiting another ten or twenty minutes for the next bus and being a little late for work is not as bad as getting hit by a car and missing a whole morning's work. And also: Just because the car has a stop sign doesn't mean it will stop. And also: The car usually wins. [ at 1:57 PM • by Abby • permalink • ] |
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