On Saturday, September 12th, 2009, my THON organization (Springfield) went on a "camping" trip. Basically, a girl in Springfield (my friend Sam K) has a cabin in the woods of a mountain right around Harrisburg, and we figure that's as good a reason as any to spend time together. Some people actually did sleep outside in tents, but a lot of people wuss out and sleep inside. I had slept outside when we went there last year, and was adamant on not sleeping outside again this time around.
Well anyway. My car ride down was pretty cool. The shotgun seat was taken by a kid named Alan, who was really easy to talk to and I had a really good time getting to know him, and Tanvi T and Rachael G were in the backseat being goofy and funny as well. There was a sophomore I didn't know named Ajay sitting in the seat right behind me, which is a hard place to engage someone in conversation from, and he unfortunately didn't talk too much in either of the car rides. I forget what we listened to most of the way there. Right before we got to the cabin, we took a pit stop to get some food (just in case) and I picked up some Tastykake mini chocolate doughnuts, because they're awesome, and I did last year. Note that this would be my eventual downfall.
So we continued on to the camp, listening to my Summer 2009 CD including Wicked which pretty much everyone seemed to like, and showed up at a closed gate thinking we had gotten there first. Service wasn't good, so I had to use Ajay's phone (only one getting service) to call Sam and ask if she was there yet. Apparently she was, and she'd opened the gate, so we were at the wrong place, and we headed down the mountain, only to find out we were going the wrong direction, and headed back on up. Eventually we got there, and we were preeetty much the last ones to arrive. Oh well, no big.
So I got my stuff out and put it on a bed, and left the doughnuts on the table inside the cabin and took a couple for myself. Kids outside were working on getting the fire started, but didn't have any kindling or anything. I went into the house to look for something to start the fire, and decided a phone book from like 1996 would be a pretty good place to start. Sam said it was okay to use it, so I handed to the fire starters and told them to use that.
I think it was right after this that I decided I wanted more doughnuts. So I started heading toward the house again, doing a sort of half-jog which you might do to pick up a Frisbee which someone had thrown too far. It's a glass door at this part of the cabin, usually with a cinderblock in front of it because it's about two feet off the ground. I forget if the cinderblock was there or not at this time. Well anyway, once I got about two paces in front of the door, I sort of realized Oh, crap, there's a door there, huh? Yeah, there is. And it's probably closed, isn't it? Yup, it's closed. Darn. So I tried to slow down. I knew that I wouldn't be able to stop in time. I didn't think it was going to be any big deal, I'd just bounce of the door and hopefully no one would notice, whatever.
No, wrong. I hit the door and the thing shatters all over me. I'm just completely dumbfounded at what just happened. There's spiderwebbed door all over the place, half of the front pane is missing, and it was really loud, to top it all off. I don't remember this extremely clearly, but apparently the first thing that happened was Laura R turning to me and saying, "Did that seriously just happen?" To which I responded, "Uhh... yeah, that just happened." Then I looked at my hand and noticed it was bleeding. Like, pretty seriously. Like you could probably slip a dime into one of the gashes on my hand. Fortunately I was wearing a jacket and jeans, so my arms and knees were safe from anything getting to my skin there. People started to see the blood and I think picked up it might be pretty serious, so we started to consider taking me to the ER, or calling an ambulance. I thought I was doing pretty okay, so I walked over to where all the cars were (the other side of the cabin) to wait for someone to be able to take me. Someone brought me paper towels to help control the bleeding a little bit.
I wasn't feeling any pain at all, which means that I had gone into shock. Pretty neato! It remained pretty neato until my body was not in shock and decided that it was a bad idea for me to be able to stand up, and insisted on bringing me to the brink of passing out every time I attempted to do so. The first time that this happened, Katy P was walking me to the deck to make sure I could get to a seat safely, and I got really upset, which pretty much never happens with me. I said angrily to her, "Call. A f***ing. Ambulance." She told me that people were in the process. Sam was on the phone with her dad, and I couldn't hear anyone on the phone with an ambulance, so I was getting pretty frustrated, especially since I thought I just might die if I passed out. Or that it wasn't that I was about to pass out, but that I was about to die.
Eventually I realized that I would be pretty much okay as long as I could sit down, and it was decided that Katy would take me to the ER in Harrisburg rather than call an ambulance. Mike H decided to come along too. Katy is studying medicine/emergency care and Mike is a very well-trained lifeguard, knows CPR, might have been an EMT, stuff like that. Dana also came along to be official hand-holder, pretty much. Mike had been to the hospital before, but never from this direction, and had a general idea of where we were going, but we had to guess at a couple of points where we were supposed to go. We ended up getting there in about 40 minutes. The bleeding had mostly stopped by then.
Dana and I got out first at the ER while Katy and Mike found a place to park. I registered with them, told them what was wrong, and was asked to wait for triage. Most of the other people in the waiting room didn't have anything visibly wrong with them, which made me way more worried than if there had just been blood all over them or something like that. There were probably 4 kids in the room that night all wearing the same purple and yellow football jerseys. Eventually we were called into Triage, and we all went in together. One nurse asked me when I had my last tetanus shot, and I said I didn't know, and she laughed at me and said, "Yeah, probably today." I think it was after this that we took a new set of chairs, and Mike started to read a magazine for people over the age of 70 and actually got pretty interested in an article about some harmless old man who rode his bike all over the world. I tried to read through it too, but we got interrupted.
We watched TV while we waited, also. There was football on. Mike and Katy were interested in it, Dana and I not so much. We got called back to the last registration part pretty quickly, and the woman kept talking about how tired she was, which made the whole thing feel pretty sketch. She asked me "Can you sign here?" at one point on one of those credit-card swiping things, which you can't even sign with your good hand when it's function. I laughed and was like, "No. I can't sign." So I picked up the stylus with my left hand and put a happy face on the signature line. The receipt printed with the happy face as my signature. We got called back to the room pretty quickly.
The woman there said that only two people could come with me. We were agonizing over the decision for a little bit, but eventually she said, "Oh, hell, just everyone come." So we celebrated to ourselves and all went back. First she had me try to clean the wounds myself, but then put my hand in a solution that clears out dried blood from the skin. At one point somebody referred to us as "friends," and we talked about that later, and how all the weird things we'd been through tonight alone definitely made us friends. That felt nice.
Eventually an attending physician came and said that things really didn't look too bad, and a nurse came after a little bit and took me back to get X-Rays so we could make sure no glass was inside my hand. That didn't take long at all, and soon after I came back to the room where my three friends were waiting, the physician came again and said that the x-rays showed no glass. She said she would just need to wrap my hand, and I'd pretty much be good to go.
Before she did, I asked her if the one gash on my hand would need stitches, and she said no. There was a pretty big flap of skin hanging from it though, which was clearly not doing anything productive, and she was fiddling with it. I asked her if she needed to get rid of it, and she said, "Yes, can I?" So I said yes, because I'm totally the kind that picks at my scabs. She slowly tore it off, and it was WAY more painful than I had anticipated. Like, holy crap. Farewell, skin! It was the only pain I experienced the whole night, and the bleeding resumed in that spot for a while afterward. She wrapped up my hand, I got a few band-aids from the nurse, and we headed out to wait to be dismissed. The nurse that had me try to sign the credit card thing came out a few minutes later and told us we were free to go, so we left.
I apologized a lot to Mike and Katy and Dana for screwing up their camping night. We did go to Sheetz on the way back, however, and ended up taking WAY longer than we anticipated there and getting a lot more food than we had thought. But even that was nice, actually, and we got to brag about going to Sheetz. They all said they didn't mind though and that they actually had a good time anyway, and we got back to the camp by 11, so they still had a good amount of night left to enjoy with everyone.
Everyone asked me how I was doing when they saw me. Some people who hadn't shown up yet asked me what the hell happened. I felt a little dumb saying the story, but it's no big deal. I told everyone I was doing fine. I gave my remaining mozzarella sticks from Sheetz to Gabby and one other person, who were the first to come to the car when we returned. Someone made me take a picture prominently displaying my wrapped up hand, which I think is now on Facebook. People laughed at all my dirty jokes we told around the fire later and Meg asked me to sit on her lap, I think. I wondered if people were just being nice to me because I was an incurable dumbass. Hannah told a really good dirty joke involving OB/GYNs and numbing things, but it only works in real life.
Peace out.
