The day I flew and fell onto the earth

When I left our house to go to the work at The Local on Tuesday, March 3, 1998, it was like a thousand other morning. However, it ended as one of a thousand.

I stopped to send a letter in a blue box in the Willow Grove Avenue in front of the Chestnut Hill Academy. (The box is no longer there.) While I returned to my car (it was raining hard), I slipped into a puddle and literally flew into the air and landed hard on the street on my left side. Of course I had already fallen and was sometimes limp with a blue spot and/or a slight swelling or a day for a day or so.

But I knew immediately that this autumn was much, much worse. It felt like I was stabbed into the hip area with a huge knife, and every time I tried to move, it felt like I was stabbed again. The pain was a white hot flame without mercy. I lay in the middle of the street when cars drove past.

Somehow I managed to get into the local offices with the help of colleagues in the car and to the local offices. I couldn't get up because of the painful pain. The then Eduitor Marie Jones said I should be driven directly to the emergency room of the Chestnut Hill Hospital, but there was a time sensitive article on which I had worked on that I promised to be ready.

Twice in the morning I had to be pushed down a hallway in my chair into the bathroom, and I can really say that since then I have been able to empathize in wheelchair -bound people. Just getting my body out of the chair and back to the toilet seat in one stand and back was torture. I cannot imagine how paralyzed people do this routinely in bathrooms that are not accessible. It's about as easy as trying to change a tire on a frenzied car.

In any case, I ended up the article on the front page, but I couldn't stand the pain more when an employee arrived in Philadelphia at 9-1-1 at 2:50 p.m. Fifteen minutes later, I wore the stairs down in a chair, whereby I was on a steel (again converting) and Meroved Meroved Me to the Castnut Hill emergency recording at around 3:30 a.m. 3:30 a.m., at 3:30 a.m., at 3:30 a.m., at 3:30 a.m., at 3:30 a.m., at 3:30 a.m., at 3:30 a.m., at 3:30 a.m., at 3:30 a.m., at 3:30 a.m., at 3:30 a.m.

I would not say that there were a long series of people who were waiting to be seen, but I think the man in front of me needed treatment for a wound of Musket. I was lying on a Gurney, my body bent like a pretzel that could not move a muscle for a month-actually more than two and a half hours. I asked a nurse for pain medicine, but she said she was allowed to give me until X -rays were taken.

I was finally brought to the X -ray department, where a technician told me that he had to smooth my leg to take X -rays. He did this. I pushed out a cry that could be heard in Wyndmoor.

“The bad news,” said the radiologist about an hour later, “that you broke your hip and pelvis. The good news is that it is your acetabulum that is broken and that is the best place to break a pool.”

I asked the doctor: “What is the worst place? New Jersey?”

I ended up in room 472 in the medical/surgical community at 7:30 p.m. I told the nurses, I wanted a room with a sea view or at least a look at the Wissahickon Creek. I also wanted a sauna and a whirlpool, but I didn't get it. I think it's all you know.

When I was taken to my room in the hospital, I thought that television could distract me from the pain, but when I laughed at a sitcom scene, pain shot through the entire left side of my body. From then on, I only saw sad shows like the 11 a.m. messages.

I would no longer mention that the staff of Chestnut Hill Hospital might not be friendlier. An almost uninterrupted phalanx of employees came to every room to correct with patients. A nurse, Jean Bradley, who had a call as an angel of mercy, had been in Chestnut Hill Hospital for so long that from 1961 to 1964 she had taught her from 1961 to 1964 to the now dissolved Chestnut Hill Hospital School of 1964.

After I had been sent home, the home visitors from the home care center unit of the hospital, Janice Arena and Lisa Eddy, were not more helpful to teach me how to negotiate the crutches and teach me exercises that were definitely accelerating my recovery. (The invoice for two days in the hospital was more than 5,000 US dollars, for which we luckily had insurance.)

I have no surgery because the doctors said that this kind of “clean” breaks finally healing themselves. In the first few days at home it was agony to only get out of the hospital bed in our living room to visit the Commode Five meter away. For two weeks I was limited to the first floor of our house and came to the conclusion that we definitely needed new wallpaper.

Then I was able to run with a hiker for a few weeks and then crutch for a few weeks and then a cane for a few weeks. It took about two months before I could go back to work and a few months and a half more months before I could go normally.

If there is one thing that I learned from this painful torture, it is the following: whether you go or drive, get slower, especially in bad weather. If you save a minute or two, you can pain and inability for weeks or months – or even worse.

Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com