As the famous nursery rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie” posits, “We all fall down.”
Some of us more spectacularly than others.
Picture this: Monday night, around 8pm. I’ve just left work and I’m heading home while texting my boss about the progress we’re making. I do this all the time! I pride myself on being able to text/film Insta stories/tweet while walking, or maybe I just take it for granted. So anyway, I’m texting on the staircase leading up out of my home station when — —
WHAM!
All of the sudden, I’m on the ground, and everything hurts. My first thought, I kid you not, is “Is my phone okay?” I landed on it, holding it in my left hand. Still on my hands and knees on the wet (it was raining that day!) concrete steps, I check my phone for signs of cracks. Miraculously, my phone AND treasured phone case are completely unscathed!
My friends, I would not be so lucky.
My knuckles on my right hand, where I landed on a balled fist, are scraped and muddy, as is the right knee of my jeans. Both knees feel badly scraped (in fact, they were!). And my left hand aches SO BADLY that I can’t move it.
Slowly, I pick myself up as hipsters come down the stairs towards me, looking at this filthy old lady sprawled out on the staircase. I hobble cautiously up the rest of the stairs and through the turnstile, and the shuffle the two blocks to my home. It’s a tough three flights of stairs, and when I make it in the door, I wash the dirt off my hands and inspect my knees. Yes, they’re both scraped, I note as I gingerly slide into my sweatpants (SWEATPANTS — The Cure For What Ails Ya!™) and my right knee has a bump on it the size of a Cadbury Creme Egg. My ring finger on my left hand has started to swell, and I can’t bend or straighten it out without considerable pain.
Now I’m in bed, in my sweatsuit, trying to explain what’s happened to me to the search bar of my Internet browser:
“fell on concrete + finger swollen + broken bones?”
“fell on hand + swollen digits + sprain?”
My friends, even worse than the fall is the feeling of loneliness and frailty that settles over me in these moments. Man, did it ever suck to have to limp around my kitchen to make my own dinner with one hand, wishing I could pull someone, ANYONE, aside and ask “Does this look broken to you?” The life of solitude, with all its freedoms, has some drawbacks. I felt like Samantha Jones when she got that cold, and couldn’t get any of her fuck buddies to make her the special cold cure she needed to get better. Times like these just SUCK.
I finally got my wish the next day, when I showed my hand off to my boss. The general consensus is that it’s not broken if I can move it (I can! and it doesn’t hurt anymore!), but that I should ice it if it’s swollen (who has the time? Maybe later tonight).
The moral of the story is of COURSE: DON’T TEXT ON STAIRWELLS!