Fall--makes me think of...

I slid into the summer evening tennis season with my usual eager anticipation, headed to a Thursday night Ladies League doubles match at a club nestled in the deep woods of Potomac.  The opponents won the first game. We switched sides, I was serving, and it was 40-15. The return hit was out wide.  I went running for it and toppled over on my right side, knee, shoulder and then resoundingly hard on the right side of my face. Miraculously, I never lost consciousness. Soon I was s surrounded by 11 well-meaning women deciding what to do with me: Stop the profuse nose bleed. Get towels and ice packs.   Go here, go there for treatment.

For half an hour I had 15 women acting as my “talking mirror,” looking at me and saying things like: “Oh my God!”  “Oh well, when you have the plastic surgery; just have them throw in an eye lift.”  “You look like a battered woman.” 

As soon as I was in the ambulance, my nose stopped bleeding and I told the paramedic that I was starting to feel pain.  He explained that meant I was losing adrenaline because of the “whole fight and flight thing.” Enough sophisticated medical talk. I knew I was all right when we started talking football, learned he was a Cowboys fan, groaned and told me he was making me feel worse.

Suburban Hospital Emergency Department: They could see that I was some sort of suburban damsel in distress, most likely of the tennis variety, but not a first tier emergency. I spent some time in the waiting room before they wheeled me to the most important triage area—the billing department. Then I saw a nurse, and I was assigned to a bed in “Level 2.”  My husband arrived and told me I didn’t look as bad as he thought I would. Another talking mirror.  A Physician’s Assistant arrived and told me I would need a tetanus shot, and a Computed Tomograhy (CT) scan of my head and face.

Waiting for those results was the hardest part.  One more inch and we are looking at a subarachnoid hemorrhage.  My husband guided me through the catastrophizing phase and finally the Physician’s Assistant  came back with the good news that my brain was A-OK but my nose was broken. I was advised to call a plastic surgeon or an ear nose and throat (ENT) specialist the next day.

Leaving the hospital, I finally saw myself in a mirror and I looked like hell.

I called my ENT the next morning, and was astonished to learn that she didn’t even want to see me until several days later after the swelling subsides.  The doctor took one look and asked what happened, and then told me I needed to avoid all “contact sports” for the next two weeks. Tennis proclaimed a contact sport.  The only real contact that goes on in our league is contacting the captain of the other team to confirm that we are playing.  She proposed a shocking, nonsurgical solution--she would just push the bones back into place manually. She said:   ”You would be out, of course, because you wouldn’t want to hear the sounds of the bones moving around.”  She was able to schedule me for the next day at Sibley Hospital.

The “procedure” took all of 10 minutes.  And I left with an adorable nose cast which I was to wear two days.  I kept it.  I thought it might make a nice still life perched on a banana, the fruit most associated with falls.