My Trip to the Emergency Room

After my terrible fall, my husband called 911, telling the operator that I needed to be transported to the hospital since I couldn't get into our car.  He told the operator, "They don't need to turn the siren on or anything like that." A few minutes later, we heard a siren approaching, and looking out the window, saw a firetruck and am an ambulance, along with 4 firemen and 2 paramedics from the ambulance.  Well, I guess all our neighbors are in for a show, I thought.

I had four firemen in my front room helping me lie down. Sounds a bit like the beginning of a sexy erotic romance, doesn't it?  Not so. They put me on a stretcher and loaded me into an ambulance taking me to St. Joseph's Hospital's Emergency Room.  All the while I was praying that I didn't have a broken hip.

Once inside the hospital, the nurses took me to get an X-ray and tried to transfer me from the hospital bed to a table where they could x-ray me. When they lined up my bed to the x-ray table, they said, "Scoot over." It was impossible: I couldn't. It was too painful and my hips weren't working. It felt like my pelvis was paralyzed. Eventually, they got a blanket underneath me and pulled it slowly, moving me over to the table.  They told me to bend my feet so that my big toes met.  I complied, but it was very painful.

They took me back to my room, and I waited for the results.  A young doctor who looked like the main character in a 60s show Doctor Kildare came in looking chipper.  He told me, "Well...I've good some good news and some bad news.  The good news is that you don't have a broken hip.  The bad news is that you fractured your pelvis in two places."

He also told me that there was nothing they could do about it and the best course of action was pain management and physical therapy.  They ordered a walker for me and I waited for about a half-hour.  A nurse came in and gave me a shot of a pain killer. I was so glad that I didn't have to stay overnight in the hospital.  I had visions of having to be there for days and then being transferred to a rehabilitation hospital--a very bleak outlook indeed.