What You’ve All Been Waiting For
I don’t think I’m going to do a huge multi-part blog-tastic description of my mini-vacation in Maine. I just don’t think you need to hear five days worth of posts that mostly go like this:
Woke up at the crack of whenever I felt like it. Tried not to wake up Kate. Failed. Watched the Regis and Kelly show. Bathing suit, sunscreen, towel, magazine, beach. Shower. “Lovely beverage.”
So instead, I’ll just give you some highlights. Starting with the most tragic.
The week of beach-ness always coincides with Mike’s birthday. This year, for his birthday, his parents decided to get him one of those skim board things. I don’t know how prevalent these things are, so I’ll give you a quick description. It’s like a miniature surf board, only thinner and with no fin or anything. Actually, it’s more like a slice of luan or similarly thick piece of fiberglass in a more-or-less egg shape. To use it, one goes to the very edge of the water and throws it along the top of the tail-end of a wave. It skims over the top, and you run and jump onto it to go for a ride.
Every year, we see kids of all ages flailing around on these things. Some get pretty good at it, and almost “look cool.” I think that coolness is what got Mike interested in the first place.
So, the night before his birthday, we were down in Old Orchard center, mostly to eat pizza and play arcade games. But before any of that could start, we had some shopping to do. Kate, who has become acclimated to weather like this (note “feels-like” temperatures over 100 – or at least they were when I looked) than this (note overnight low in the fifties – or at least it was when I looked) failed to bring a sweatshirt with her. I, who is more likely to forget any given thing than remember it, left my sweatshirt back at the cottage. So we stopped at one of the ghetto-looking buy-crap-here stores and picked up a two-for-one sweatshirt deal, a skim board painted with angry looking sea critters, and some wax. The board went back to the car, the sweatshirts went over our tanks, and the night went on providing stories for another entry.
The next day, as we were sitting on the beach doing a blessed nothing, the tide finally started to recede. Mike had determined that the best skim board times were when the tide was heading out rather than in. So he pulled the board out of the sand behind us (Kate had already waxed it), and begged me to come down to the water with him. Try one: The board stops dead in the sand. Try two: Mike runs too fast and oversteps. Try three: Success is written all over this one… except… nope.
Imagine an old-timey comedy act. You know, the kind with the poking out of eyes and the flying pies? Now imagine the time has come for the banana peal. Now imagine the banana peal is the skim board, and Mike is the “unsuspecting” victim. He was on the ground before you could blink.
“My arm is broken.”
I grabbed the board and brought him back to our seats, where his family was kind of giggling until they saw the looks on our faces. We made haste back to the cottage, took quick showers, and shortly Mike, his mom, and I were off to the emergency room. After a brief moment of complete confusion in the parking lot, we walked into the ER just in time to hear the triage nurse telling the person she was seeing that they were kind of swamped today and it might be a long while.
Great.
Triage. Registration. Wait.
In no way am I a patient person. In between various bouts of shifting in my seat, I called Kate, read a magazine, read another magazine out loud to try to amuse Mike (who couldn’t be less amused), and did what everyone in an ER does. I tried to see if I could mentally triage everyone in the room to see where we were in line. I soon grew so impatient that I went in to ask the triage nurse when Mike was going to be called in. She said she was just filling out paperwork for the X-ray, and he was next to head there. Sweet!
I spare you even more boring tales of waiting in the X-ray waiting room, the hallway of “urgent care,” and the room (once they finally found one). Along the way, though, we met up with a lady who had the exact same swelling in her left arm as Mike had in his right arm. They were on the same track, following each other around the building. So, when we overheard the doctors talking about “the other fractured wrist,” we knew Mike’s was broken.
They weren’t actually that convinced. Turns out they couldn’t find it on the X-ray. But I guess that’s normal for this kind of break. But ultimately, they suspected that he had a hairline fracture in one of the more important bones that makes it possible for you to move your hand and thumb every which way. They gave him a nifty leather and metal splint (it looks a lot like a gauntlet) and told him to call his regular doctor in a week to set up new X-rays. (I guess it’s easier to see once the swelling’s gone down… but I’m not a doctor and I hardly understand them.)
So, my friends, that’s the story about how my boyfriend broke his wrist on his birthday. Due to the lateness of the hour, we didn’t really get to have a birthday dinner, like we normally do. We picked up KFC on the way back to the cottage. We did make it to the Japanese place the following day, though.
Ouch! I hope you feel better Mike! Yaaay Diane for trying to keep a hurt angry person amused while in the emergency room!