Wednesday, May 9, 2012

A Broken Wrist

This happened to me many years ago. You who are students out there, can still sympathize though. Enjoy the story!

 This is Karolina Kurkova riding her bike. I'm sure I didn't look that pretty!

My husband and I were both graduate students and had four young children at home. We were riding our bikes wherever we could to save money and get through school as soon as possible.

One day rode my bike down a steep street, checking ahead and seeing a green light. It looked like an easy crossing so I let the bike pick up speed on the incline, as suddenly two female students stepped into the road without checking for the go-ahead light for pedestrians, and without checking if the road I was on was clear. I slammed onto the brakes, trying to avoid the girls and managed to do so, but in the process I lost control of the bike and slid to a hard crash. Stunned, I lay on the ground. Eventual the campus police and the ambulance arrived. I assured the EMTs that I was fine, but they insisted on checking me, found I had broken part of my front tooth, and had an either sprained or broken wrist.

The police had alerted my husband, and he arrived before the EMTs could take me to the hospital. My husband assured them he’d take me to the campus doctor right away, so we wouldn’t have to pay the extra money for the ambulance. The doctor X-rayed my wrist and told me the small bone was broken, and he couldn’t do anything for me, but would refer me to a specialist.

We knew this would be costly, but we really didn’t have a choice, so we went to see the specialist. Eventually, we would also have to fix my tooth, since I was a teaching assistant, and didn’t think I should teach undergrad classes with a missing tooth. I felt better after we talked it over in the car on our way to the specialist and decided to use our meager savings.

The new doctor looked at the X-ray we had taken with us, shook his head and said, “This is a bad break. You need to have a metal pin to keep the two parts of the bone together until they knit.”

Check in tomorrow for the ending!

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