I did not plan to find myself driving from the barn where I board my horse Ben to the hospital with a wad of paper napkins stanching the bleeding from my ankle. But let me start at the beginning:
I’d watched the morning forecast, which was ominous for a nasty storm front rapidly approaching. I got the cats fed and cleaned up after, skipped breakfast, and headed right out to the barn to get Ben into shelter before the riproaring got going.
When I arrived the rain was already beginning to pitter-patter down from a lowering, storm-clouded sky. Ben was way out in the large turnout with Baxter and Apollo. As I led Ben in, Apollo followed – “Hey! Don’t take my good buddy away! Imma come too!” And he would not be shooed away.
We got to the gateway between the field and the ring. I swung Ben through it with one hand; flapped my other hand at Apollo to discourage him; tried to pull/slide shut a gate-closing board with my third hand….
Oh, wait. Yeh. That did not go well. That went so badly, in fact, that the plank – ten feet long, an inch and a half thick – fell out of my hand and scythed down the outside of my right ankle.
DAMN, THAT HURT.
I tossed the lead rope over Ben’s neck and let him go; managed to get a barrier across the gate opening, frustrating Apollo; looked down at my ankle and saw blood. Quite a bit of blood. And it HURT. I pulled my sock out a bit and could see that the scything slide of the plank had taken some of my skin and flesh with it, down into a neat roll at the bottom of the wound, which was about four inches high and three inches wide at the bottom.
CRAP. Meanwhile, Ben was calmly grazing, while a car pulled in and another boarder arrived – who could have held Apollo for me if only…. Oh, well. I could walk on that side more or less okay, so I collected Ben, got him into his stall, grabbed a wad of paper napkins from the grain room, stuffed them inside my sock to try to stanch the bleeding – that HURT – got in my car, and drove the 20 minutes or so to Beverly Hospital, a smallish but excellent community hospital. Driving HURT.
I lucked into a spot in the ground level of the parking garage, hobbled over to the ER entrance, and sought aid. There was waiting, of course, with more intermittent pain, but not too bad (wait and pain both), and everyone was sympathetic and helpful within their roles. I finally had a veteran physician’s assistant do the cleaning of the wound and the repair – dammit, the preliminary injections of anesthetic HURT, but then the pain, oh joy oh bliss, went away – and wound up with 14 stitches and some Steri-Strips at the top, where the layer of skin dislodged was the thinnest and less likely to hold more stitches. She told me I was lucky; no nerves, large blood vessels, bone, tendons, or muscles had been damaged.
So I was released, sometime after 1:00, and emerged from the hospital – into clouds and sunshine. The storm front had passed, minus any riproaring, and Ben hadn’t needed to come in after all.
CRAP.
I was too embarrassed to ask, but I really wanted to know.