You spend 20 minutes looking for your new shirt, and they cut it off of you in the emergency room.
Sunday was a Very Bad Day. Zenny tripped and fell backwards while shopping, pivoting from her ankle onto her head on solid tile, and had a seizure. She stopped breathing, turned blue. My mother stayed calm, tried to help her breathe. I realized I had left my my phone in the car and begged one off a stranger, sobbed at the 911 dispatcher. The EMTs arrived and strapped her to a board with a neck brace. They closed themselves into the ambulance with her and made me wait on the curb while they worked to get her breathing again. When she started coming around, they hurried me into the passenger seat and we drove to the hospital with a tail of cars like opportunistic dolphins behind a boat. The ER social worker kept me outside the curtain while I bobbed around, crying and trying to answer her questions and fill out paperwork. Zenny was admitted for the night for observation, and we get to go home today.
Assholes get all the press, but people are largely good. Onlookers formed an honor guard while we waited for the ambulance with her limp body. The doctors smiled and bent over her face to encourage her, even while there was blood all over the floor from a fatal shotgun wound they had just dealt with. A nurse brought her a stuffed frog. An ER patient’s family member bought her a stuffed toy at the gift shop. Zenny made friends in the hospital wing with a laughing 8 month old who had had his nose bitten off by a dog. That child’s parents are in the middle of a long stretch of horror as they wait to see if the bit sewn back on will reattach, but they brought a guitar, and they had smiles for Zenny.
I may owe it to the world to knit some hospital hats and donate stuffed animals to the ER.
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