JOGGING HELL

I was jogging around the Lorbeer middle school track as I always do but today was a very different day. Somehow, I tweeked my left ankle, perhaps stepping on a rock and turning my ankle inward. It bent and bent some more and before I knew it, I was falling with my right knee headed toward destruction. It must have fallen on another inconspicuous rock because by the time I was on the ground in a puff of dirt, my right knee was split wide open.

I couldn't tell if it was split or if a big piece of meat had been rubbed off. While I was still in a bit of shock, I looked around to see if that piece of meat was laying around on a piece of rock. I couldn't find it and decided it wouldn't make much sense to bring it along with me even if I found it. I doubted that the doctor would be able to sew it back on.

I'm not insured so I had to contact a local hospital to ask them where I should go. They referred me to the Pomona Valley health clinic. They also said I could go to a county hospital, but since Pomona Valley was closer, I decided to go there.

The Physicians Assistant Margeret Galileo was very nice and thought some stitches were in order. She thought an internal one with two surface ones would do the trick. However, the doctor told her to use staples instead. She asked me how I was with pain. I didn't know what she meant. She was trying to gauge whether I needed some lidocain. I figured I could tough it out since I'm uninsured and after hearing that she used some on a kid the other day and he was fine.

It wasn't that painful, but there was definitely pain. I'd say a 3-4 on my personal pain scale. What made it worse was that she was stabbing these staples right into the open wound. To make matters worse, she didn't like how the first one went in so she had to do it again. That was not fun.

So now I'm hobbled and perhaps this is life telling me to consider the difficulties older people and people who are crippled face every single day.