This is just not happening to me 1

22nd Jul 2008

Hello lovely people

If you have ever experienced a sudden shock, you would probably have noticed how time suddenly slowed down and how you can still remember every moment of what happened, as if in slow motion.  You would also have noticed how you and any other people involved acted irrationally or out of character.

I once hurried to enter a building where people were kept hostage.  I slipped and fell on the sidewalk, and my leg was broken in four places – just like that.  I can remember trying to get up and then looking in wonder at the bone that was sticking through the flesh, and wondering how my foot managed to get into a wrong 90 degree angle.

A colleague came running to me and said with relief in his voice “Oh! You have only broken your leg!”  I thought “Thanks mate! I will deal with you later.”  What he meant was that he was quite aware of the hostage situation inside the building and that the person was armed.  When he heard the crack of my leg breaking and saw me fall, he thought I had been shot, and he was genuinely relieved that I only had a broken leg – and so was I, but only much later.  That fall had saved my life.

Even then there was no pain – the pain only started about two hours later when the ambulance people put me on a stretcher.  Looking back, I must have had excruciating pain, but my mind was busy phoning a relative to arrange for toiletries, taking care of the little jewellery I wore at the time, and arranging for a spare container that I could use in hospital for my contact lenses.  Not quite normal behaviour when you have a broken leg that requires a steel pin and four months on crutches, but at the time it was perfectly normal for me to organise things as quickly as possible, and only then to attend to the pain.

The other irrational thing that happened was when the ambulance arrived.  The ambulance attendant literally walked around me and then asked my colleague “When did this happen – today?”.  My colleague’s glib response was “Actually, no, it happened yesterday, but she is in our way now, and that is why we called you.”

Of course I refused to be touched by those ambulance people.  I insisted on waiting for an ambulance from a private hospital, even when I was told that it would be expensive and take time to arrange this.  My reasoning was that I was not losing any blood, I was – astonishingly – not in pain, and I wanted to be treated with such professional skill that I could eventually walk and use my leg normally again.  Looking back, this kind of rational thinking did not quite go with the severity of the injury.  To be continued.

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Love and Light
Elsabe

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