Seeing people die does something to you. When it's your blood on the floor, it's fucking scary.
Let me set the scene. It was 12/12/12. I was wearing my grey cashmere blend sweater pants. I was doing laundry. If you didn't know, my washer and dryer are in the kitchen in my house. Bella was crying for me to hold her, tiny little arms reaching up. I finish throwing clothes in the dryer, close it and hit the button before scooping her up. As I turn, I must navigate between the laundry baskets on the floor behind me and the box.
Let me just explain the box. I emptied a box of diapers, a big one, and it was in the kitchen next to the garbage can when I decided I should use this box for all the little baby socks that didn't fit Bella anymore. So I had this box by my laundry baskets, full of kid's socks and ominous as hell.
I stepped over a laundry basket, or tried to, and fell onto the corner of this box, on a place you don't want to fall. When it happened Bella came down with me and bumped her head. I cradled her, rubbing at her head, righted myself, took one step and cried out. Jamie's brother called out from the living room, "You okay, Beth?"
"Yeah!" No, fuck no. Ouch. I had turned Bella loose, and knelt feet, knees and forehead against the floor. A big fat drop of blood hit the carpet, and I got up and ran for the bathroom.
Blood started pouring as soon as I moved. In the bathroom I pulled my pants--my cashmere fucking pants--and tried to observe the damage. Blood was streaming. I yelled for Steven, forget that I'm a prude, it was do or die. I grabbed a huge pad from the cabinet. When he saw me standing in my blood-soaked pants, dark and wet from crotch to floor, his jaw dropped. "Wake Jamie up, somebody's got to take me to the hospital."
While he did that I tried to shower the blood off, but quickly realized that the blood was pouring out much, much too fast. The pad that I just put on was already soaked before I jumped in the tub, and the bathroom looked like a crime scene from my efforts.
I dressed, grabbing an old pair of jogging pants and a towel. Jamie burst into the bathroom, "Are you ready to go? Let's go!" And I was snapping pictures on my iPod. "What are you doing?" Exasperation. "Nobody is ever going to believe this shit," I replied, following him out.
Jamie drove like a crazy person, so I held the oh-shit handle and relived every false -labor hospital run I'd ever had. He dropped me at the doors of the emergency room and I grabbed the towel and held it to my ass and ran.
"Help! I'm bleeding profusely!" were my first words to the startled nurse behind the glass, another nurse coming from around the desk grabbed a wheelchair and helped me sit. In moments she had me in a room, on a table and was holding pressure on the wound. (awkwardness factor level: excruciating ) Doctor, nurses, phone calls, Jamie answering questions and doing paperwork. Of course I told them the story. They asked all kinds of questions, and my gynecologist, who worked in the building, would come to stitch me up.
"You hit an artery," she was stitching. They gave me shots of lidocaine beforehand, so the pain had ebbed. Pain was the least of my problems...
Well, there you have it. My incredibly awkward and horrible near death experience.
With the holidays coming up I always think of this experience and think about how lucky we are to have emergency medicine. Otherwise I'd be dead.
Family always wants to know what I've been doing, when am I going to finish my book? I hate these questions because the answers are "I don't know" and "Eventually." But I've got to entertain them with some prospect so...if you really want to know what I've been doing, I've been surviving life, one day at a time. And I'm thankful for the opportunity.
