Sleep, Pray, Drugs: A Royal Emergency

Sometimes I feel like I have spent my whole life waiting for something. Waiting to feel better. Waiting in doctor's offices for the results of my unremarkable blood tests. Waiting for a diagnosis so that then I can wait for a cure. Waiting to fall in love. Waiting for the bus.

The opposite of waiting is an emergency.

If you are going to break your wrist, the British countryside of the landed gentry is not a bad place to do it. Hot gardeners can be ogled while lounging by the pool. An ample supply of booze and pâté can distract you from the pain of existence, if only for the brief period of time it takes to digest them. And the softest toilet paper next to the porcelain throne, which overlooks, without argument, the best views I’ve ever had really glamorizes the ritual of a morning crap.

When my wrist dislocated and broke in three places, I was sitting on a trampoline. I would later be told that I was the fifth trampoline accident the hospital had seen that day, but I guarantee you I was the only one who no longer slept on themed sheets or worshipped macaroni and cheese. After it happened, we piled into the largest car we had, a spacious red mini.  My friend tied a striped kitchen apron around my neck like a sling, as if it had been a culinary accident, and placed a bag of frozen red currants on the rapidly swelling appendage. I remember the hilly terrain that lay between crime scene and socialized medicine as a frightening blur of green dotted with menacing white sheep; a surreal version of a lovely Sunday evening outing, narrated by the nervous driver’s incessant warnings of every approaching bump, pothole and minor undulation.

I have to admit, I sort of had a great time at the Accident and Emergency wing of the Royal United Hospital in Bath. The misnomer of any air of royalty was quickly exposed as I looked around the waiting room, and after my first shot of morphine, the pain I was in became obscured by fits of giggles. I could barely muster the seriousness to protest as one nurse firmly called me Lucy. Following my second shot, I turned to the pale green man lying in the bed next to mine. “Do you come here often?” I asked. His face twisted with pain, he grabbed his stomach. He did not appear amused by my serious inquiry.

When the doctor arrived to examine me, I was fairly certain he had also been given a relaxing shot of morphine. He asked me a series of questions, repeating them two or three times, and I was confused if my replies were incoherent or if he had just forgotten the answers. He began looking around the room in a scattered manner, pulling out needles and restraining devices at random, as if he were an actor who had just walked onto a hospital set.  “OK, so we are just going to straighten this thing out.” He looked at my wrist like he wasn’t sure if it was an ankle or possibly a knee. “I haven’t seen the x-ray yet, but why wait? Just look at yourself; clearly it’s broken!”

At this point, the doctor began to argue with the nurses about what to do next and words like manipulate, pull, reset and torture were thrown around way too casually. “You have to be the most painful part of this whole thing,” I kindly told him, the legalities and ease at which I might win a malpractice suit never far from the back of my mind. He laughed, looking around to whomever would make eye contact, and pointed a scalpel in my direction, proclaiming, “She’s a funny one!” A strategically administered sedative made it impossible for me to argue back. The nurses crowded around like kids in a candy store, and I fell asleep thinking about sailing a boat through green grassy waves, the sheep jumping all around me like feral spawning tuna.

When I woke up from my Profenal nap, my arm was bandaged, my friends were around me looking guilty, and I caught myself thinking, “Thank the Queen for government regulation of health services and subsidies derived from taxation.” Then the doctor told me my wrist was at least 80 percent straight, and I thought again about misnomers; clearly 20 percent NOT straight was a more accurate description.

I cried my first tears that night, suddenly faced with the massive divide between the acute and the chronic, like two sides of an enormous canyon. A broken wrist was so inconsequential in the face of my disease; it was specific and diagnosable and common. It would heal and fade into the past.

In the next few weeks, I alternately told people it was a croquet accident, a tea drinking incident, or, my personal favorite, “You should see the other guy.” And so I went back to waiting: waiting for bones to heal, waiting for my dignity to return, waiting for the next emergency that would knock me out of this waiting and into the bright, salty, painful experience of here and now.