The injury: A broken bone in my left hand, just below the fourth finger. I went swimming in rough surf, got knocked over, and broke a small but apparently vital bone in my hand. Below the task is documented in picture form.

What I Learned


(Before I got round to telling anyone I was injured, someone else had a minor medical problem and requested emergency room attention. I ended up escorting the person to the E.R)

GETTING MEDICAL ATTENTION
1. It is very hard to explain, during any stage of taking someone else to an emergency room, that you yourself require medical attention. First you must explain a lot of information to an apparently multiplying series of cops, rangers, medics, paramedics, and lifeguards. (That's two tasks where I've had to cite police encounters.) Then you reassure the kid's parents, and it seems highly churlish to interrupt this. And believe me when I say that nothing useful can be said during an ambulance ride, particularly when the paramedic next to you is offering to give you lap dances and explaining that he has metal plates in his head and is probably Frankenstein.

2. The more you wait in an emergency room, the harder it gets to draw attention to yourself. After the first hour or so I wasn't doing anything useful, and had figured out beyond any doubt that I'd actually broken a bone. But if you've just been determinedly reading a magazine for an hour while trying not to watch overworked technicians looking after bleeding or panicked people, it gets harder and harder to say "Erm, excuse me..."

(So I sat in the E.R, for four hours...)

EMERGENCY ROOMS
1. Emergency rooms are designed to panic people. The TV was consistently set to a History Channel program describing in gruesome detail the medical conditions at a prison camp in Chicago. The place was so badly run that something like 80% of the inhabitants died. My fellow inhabitants of the ER kept looking at each other worriedly, wondering what message the hospital was trying to send us.

2. You meet very, very strange people in emergency rooms. A very suave, grinning sort of fellow with two fingers badly slashed explained his misadventure to me by saying, simply, "Mojito". (I later found out he was a bartender.)

3. Those people in emergency rooms, who appear to be normal, tell very, very strange stories. I struck up a conversation with the security guards, who confided in me that they were worried about their roommate who has taken up playing the bongos obsessively. This does not bother them so much as the fact he does it in the nude. I asked them why, and they looked sheepishly at each other until one vouchsafed: "He thinks it's part of his Chilean heritage.".

(I saw my doctor the next day...)

MY DOCTOR
1. He is Groucho Marx reborn. I keep wanting to see him do Groucho's trademark walk.
2. He is a closet sadist. His idea of seeing if a hand is broken is to manipulate the part that is damaged to see if the patient's response is consistent with a broken bone. Since my response was to cry like a baby and only marginally resist the temptation to kick him, apparently yes.
3. The potential image manipulation when dealing with X-rays is AWESOME to any gadget appreciator. You can zoom in, play with contrast... really if it hadn't been my own bones I'd been looking at I would have found it entirely fun.

(After he'd satisfied himself that my bone was, indeed, broken, he put me in a cast and let me go with a strict injunction not to do it again)

CASTS
1. They get progressively dirtier and disreputable, which is visible in a rapidly darkening color.
2. To shower or swim, you must wear a ridiculous and bright yellow rubber thing (The GYRS = Giant Yellow Rubber Sock)
3. Typing, showering, climbing, kite flying, and swimming are the activities most impaired.
4. People ask you if you are a victim of domestic violence, and tend to hand out religious pamphlets.

I'm almost sorry I'm right-handed. If I was left-handed I would have been doing Left Handed Screwdriver for the better part of a month.