Accident-prone

I've had a few accidents over the years, mostly when I was much younger, but nothing close to being serious.

[Roughing the listener warning] I once tripped over a stepping stone set in concrete, slid, and completely pulverized and removed a thumbnail. After the shock, and the trip to the emergency room, it was more of a nuisance than anything. The great huge bandage got in the way when I went camping with the Girl Scouts that weekend.[/warning]

A year or two later, I ran down the driveway, across the sidewalk, and fell into the street. Result: a greenstick fracture of my right arm. The doctor was kind enough to set it with a slightly wider than usual angle, so I could still play my clarinet in band. I drove the substitute teacher wild, because I was still playing volleyball. What could I do to the arm? It was wrapped in plaster!

I had a few major run-ins with poison oak, specifically poison oak smoke from camping trips in the fall when the leaves have fallen off and the twigs look good for the fire. My face swelled up until I could just see, and I lived on Instant Breakfast milkshakes for several days. I have, at long last, learned to avoid the pernicious stuff.

Our biggest accident was a group project - coming home from vacation the summer I was between high school and college. We were in a little Chinook camper with two sailboats trailered behind. The wind caught the sailboats and flipped them over, and the camper followed. We three kids were in the back, tumbling around like clothes in a very dusty dryer. But even here, we came out okay. My poor sister Kai had the worst of it - her shoulder scraped along the pavement, losing a good bit of skin, and she had a small cut on her thigh. Dad and Mom both had minor cuts on their hands, and Dad was going in and out of shock. Kelly and I were fine - to the point that all the emergency people kept leaving Kelly out of the count of victims. And we had lots of help - we had two doctors and a nurse stop in short order. We all spent the night in a tiny, empty hospital and a friend of Mom's came down in her station wagon and took us all home the next day.

The serious ones, well. Dad's gallbladder surgery which landed him in the hospital for much too long - but that was my first semester in college and I was at the other end of the state and it wasn't quite real. Grandma's Alzheimer's. But she went so gently that it didn't feel like a tragedy.

We've been blessed.