ASSIGNMENTS:
|
|
Michelle Minick
Buffalo, New York USA
|
|
REPORTS:
PREVIOUS NEXT
|
|
|
I got this scar when I was 13 years old in the summer, trying to be stupid and independent. My mom would never let me leave the court where I lived because she was worried I would get kidnapped or something. But then again, she would never take me anywhere either, so it would get very boring riding my bike around the same streets over and over.
One day a pseudo-friend of mine (a fair weather friend you would say) told me she and some of her other friends were riding up to Southgate Plaza, which was only about 7 minutes away by car, about 30 minutes by bike. I'd gone with her that far before on previous days, so I thought, why not now? We grabbed our bikes and she went and got her friends. The first one was on a bike like us; the second was a guy on rollerblades. That was a problem. He couldn't keep up with us and he kept complaining we were leaving him behind. So, we got sick of his complaining and decided to actually leave him behind, you know, just for a little bit. We went on not too far ahead, to one of those minor strip malls that you see everywhere in suburbiaÑthis one was just outside the court. We waited for him to catch up, but he never did. My friend decided we couldn't just leave him, so we checked all the shops and the entire area to see if he was just hiding from us. Finally, she decided we wouldn't be going to Southgate because we had to find her friend.
So, my friend and the other girl and I started to leave by turning out onto the street back home by means of a truck exit of Home Depot. We were in a line on our bikes, my friend in front of me and her friend behind me. As we were trying to leave, a semi-truck decided that it would be turning left out of that same exitÑand we were on the left side. My friend, being in front of me, turned her bike out onto the street and rode to safety. By that point, the front of the truck was blocking my way of going forward. The girl behind me had turned her bike around and went back towards Home Depot. However, by the time that I tried to go that way, the truck's backside had blocked it. Thus my exits both in front and behind were blocked and the truck's side was coming closer and closer to me like a suspenseful horror movie. I looked next to me and saw a shallow drainage ditch, thinking safely that I had a mountain bike and I would ride smoothly down into the ditch. Luckily for me it was empty, because, it was not a smooth ride. There was a pipe in that ditch, which made it more of an overhang than a hill. As such, my bike went straight before crashing down, throwing me forward off the handle bars.
When I woke up (I don't think I was knocked out for more than 5 seconds) the first thing I saw was the two girls and the truck driver standing at the top of the ditch staring at me with worry and horror and the next thing that struck me was that my right arm was laying flat against the ground at an odd angle. I realized that it was broken and the thought that occurred to me was "My mom is going to kill me."
So my friend was standing above me panicking with the other girl, screaming and crying, "What do we do, what do we do?", while I, the injured one was calmly telling them to either go into Home Depot and call 9-1-1 or go to a house next door and call 9-1-1. This continued for a couple of minutes until a nice nurse pulled over and let the truck driver use her cell phone. She then proceeded to cover me from the sun so I wouldn't get heat exhaustion (I later found out that she worked with my aunt because as she was telling her coworkers about the girl in the ditch and my aunt piped up "Hey that was my niece!"). After I was sure that an ambulance was coming, I let myself leisurely drift into shock.
When I arrived at the emergency room, it was discovered through an X-ray (after difficulty moving me through every single door because my arm was at such an odd angle) that I had dislocated my radius and ulna (the two bones in your forearm? Yeah, they were twisted around into each other's spots) and I had broken off a piece of bone inside my elbow joint. I then spent two hours waiting for a surgery room that never opened up, and another hour waiting for a specialist to drive in and set my arm back (they apparently didn't knock me out well enough, my mom said she could hear me screaming in the hallway even though I don't remember). I had to come back in at a later date so that the doctors could put a screw in my arm so that the joint would work again. And that is how I got this scar (oh yeah, the screw is still in there too).
|
|
|
|
|
