However, there was one nurse that was, and there’s no other word more appropriate, creepy. Looking back, there is a part of me that wonders if it is cruel of me to describe her in this way, or to even share the story I am about to write, but I know that the passage of time has influenced those feelings. Time has softened my memory of her and caused me to question if she was as creepy as I remember, so I don’t trust it. Instead, I will trust my gut instinct at the time I was in the hospital, which was that she was creepy.

The hospital nurse looked very similar to Andre The Giant, pictured here.

I don’t remember her name, but I do remember her face, her build and the way she carried herself. I remember her voice, which was thick and deep. She had broad shoulders, stood about six feet tall, had a head of tight curly black hair and a face like Andre the Giant, the legendary professional wrestler. In fact, if you imagine Andre the Giant in drag as a female nurse, you would be imagining her.

From the first time she stepped into my room, I was scared of her. Initially, I felt bad for being frightened, because it was the way she looked that scared me. I hated to be so judgmental. It’s not nice and it’s not fair. However, fairly quickly, those feelings were overcome by her creepy behavior, which seemed to revolve around her always wanting to give me a sponge bath, even though I had full use of my arms and was very capable of washing up without any help.

Whenever bath rime rolled around, she’d enter my room with a washcloth, towel, bar of soap and plastic washbasin and say, “Bath time!” in a sing-songy, if baritone, tone of voice. Every time, she’d ask, “Are you sure you don’t want me to bath you, honey?” And every time, I’d tell her I could manage just fine on my own and she’d say something like, “But what about your back?” to which I’d reply, “I got it.”

I felt this pressure every single time. I’d ask her to pull the curtain and leave the room, so I could have some privacy. She never hid her rejection and with a sad, defeated look on her face, she’d pull the curtain and walk out sighing, “Just buzz the nurses station when you’re done.”

This same pattern repeated itself for weeks. Then, she found another way to creep me out. My left leg remained hanging above the bed for all 50+ days I was in the hospital. It was never covered and over time, the skin, especially on my foot, became drier and drier. This nurse, whose name I cannot recall, one day noticed this and said, “Honey, your feet are getting really dry. Why don’t you let me put some lotion on them?”

I refused.

I was able to refuse her request to rub lotion on my feet several more times over the next couple of weeks, but it became more and more difficult for me to ignore the dry skin. My foot began to itch and I could scratch it with the toes of my other foot, but the dry skin was becoming a problem. In addition, I was just tired of having this nurse constantly ask me if she could rub lotion on my foot. The image that came to my mind was unpleasant enough, that I just wanted to put an end to it.

Between the reality of my dry, itchy foot and the psychological warfare tactics being used by this nurse to imprint disturbing foot massage images on my brain, her lotion offer became harder to refuse. One day, I caved. To this day, I regret this decision.

Yes, one day she asked if she could rub lotion on my dry feet and to her and my surprise I said, “Yes! I think that’s a good idea.”

Her face lit up and she said, “Oh yes, we need to moisturize your feet. I think it will make you a lot more comfortable.” The irony. While in the long run this would probably make me more comfortable, there was nothing comforting in the idea of having this creepy woman massage my feet with lotion. But there was no turning back.

She grabbed a bottle of institutional, hospital moisturizer, popped off the cap and squeezed about two tablespoonfuls of moisturizer into her hand, rubbed her hands together and put them to work on my feet. She used her big hands and arms to really give my foot a workout, first covering the foot in what I thought was an unnecessarily large quantity of lotion. She rubbed up and down on my whole foot before concentrating between my toes, all the while the lotion making a sickeningly squishy sound. The nurse really seemed to be enjoying herself, but I had to look away. The scene was too surreal and I didn’t want these actual images in my mind, as I was afraid I would never forget them. “Squirt!” – More lotion and more rubbing of her giant hands on my tiny foot.

Let me be clear, it’s not just that this woman was pretty scary looking, but that she had a seriously pervy vibe that she’d been giving me, since the first time she entered my room. As the lotion massage progressed over what seemed like half an hour, that vibe remained. How long does one need to rub lotion on skin in order for it to be effective? Is it necessary for someone rubbing lotion on another to smile in a way that conveys that she is receiving pleasure from it, perhaps more pleasure from it than the recipient of the massage?

Before you judge me as being mean or judgmental, please consider that my assessment of this situation, in terms of what was really going on, is based on weeks of being asked by this person if I wanted her to give me a sponge bath and then another couple weeks of asking if I wanted her to rub my feet. These questions are not the same as asking if I wanted another pillow or if I needed water. These were requests from this person to have fairly intimate contact with a fifteen-year-old boy, who had repeatedly, politely, declined. None of the other nurses asked repeatedly if they could give me a sponge bath or rub lotion on my feet. It seems that a non-creepy person would have the common sense and decency to recognize that such questions made me uncomfortable and that it might be best to stop asking them. But she never did, and she really seemed to be relishing her victory over my will. While I cannot recall exactly how long the massage was, it was at least a ten minute ordeal that involved at least 4 ounces of lotion.

What’s even more disconcerting and shameful is that I remember there were moments when I started to enjoy it. These were moments when my eyes were closed and I imagined that anyone but her was massaging my foot. To snap out of these uncomfortable feelings, I’d force myself to look and see what was really going on.

However, suffering through this massage did the trick. Never again did this nurse ask if I wanted a sponge bath or a foot massage. My guess is, all she ever wanted was to break me. Once she had, the game was over and I had lost.

I don’t have a lot of memories of the day. I guess it was just like any other day, except for the Thanksgiving dinner part. Catherine may have come by for a visit, earlier in the day, but I don’t remember for certain. She was pretty committed to visiting me, so I would assume she was there.

I remember that my mom had wanted to make sure we were all together for Thanksgiving dinner, and therefore, my hospital room would have to function as a dining room for me, my sister, my parents and my brother, who had driven back from Chapel Hill, where he was a freshman at UNC.

I hated being a bother. And I felt terrible that my carelessness on a moped had, among the many unfortunate consequences, forced my family to spend Thanksgiving dinner in a cold, sterile hospital room, with me and my broken leg as the centerpiece.

The entire experience of being confined to the hospital bed might have been a lot less of a problem for me if I had allowed myself to let go and accept that I was where I was, no one was mad at me for it, and more than likely, they were just grateful that I was going to be “normal” again once I had time to recover.

But I never really let go of the idea that this never should have happened and that if I could just go back in time I would make sure that I didn’t do whatever it was that I did to cause the accident. As my recovery progressed and I started to see results, like the day I was put in a cast and released from the hospital, I stopped focusing on that idea so much. Still, it would be a long time, years, before I’d stop beating myself up over what I could have done differently to avoid the accident and the time I spent in the hospital bed, hating that I was so dependent on others.

Obviously, these observations were not that clear to me at the time. Dr. King had tried to help with his occasional comments about how I should value the experience, if only for what it would teach me about patience. But I wasn’t listening. I was fifteen and caught up in the hierarchy of high school life. Being in the hospital meant I was completely out of it. My friends were all off enjoying themselves, making new friends at Mt. Tabor and I wasn’t even on the sidelines. I was in the locker room with no view of the game. That’s kind of how I felt and I refused to let go.

I had hoped that I would be out of the hospital by Thanksgiving. Dr. King said that it might take three and a half to eight weeks for my leg to heal enough for me to be put into a cast and then discharged from the hospital. On Thanksgiving Day I had been in the hospital for five weeks and two days. I’d had enough, but the end was not near.

To simplify the meal, my mother ordered an entire Thanksgiving meal from the Harris Teeter grocery store a few weeks prior to Thanksgiving. However, when she arrived at the store to pick it up, nothing was prepared. Apparently her order had been misfiled to be prepared the following week. The store put together what they could – mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce – however the turkey was a bit of a problem. The best they could do was to giver her a half frozen turkey, which she took home and put in the oven on a very high temperature to try to cook quickly, since the rest of the family was at the hospital waiting.

When she arrived, my mother had her arms full with grocery bags. Inside were individual meals in Styrofoam take-out containers she had prepared at home. I remember everyone was quiet while we ate, except for the occasional compliment for the potatoes or the turkey. I have a vivid memory of looking at my brother as he ate and stared out of my hospital room window at Silas Creek Parkway. I have no idea what he was thinking, but I imagined he was pondering the idea that this was probably the worst Thanksgiving our family had ever had. “Did I drive all the way home for this?”

I felt bad. I was thankful to be alive. I was grateful to have my family with me. I appreciated all the hard work my mother had done in making sure the family shared a meal together on Thanksgiving, but I felt guilty for being the reason we were gathered in a hospital room eating turkey and all the fixings when everyone would have rather been at home for the holiday.

About 10 days after my femur had been reset, or about three weeks after the accident, my King, Dr. King, informed me that another surgery had to be performed. He explained that while everything was healing nicely, the screw in my tibia had to be removed and another screw would have to be drilled through my femur, just above the knee. He said that the best placement of the screw is in the femur, but that it couldn’t be drilled there initially, because my femur was too sensitive at the time of the accident. And the screw couldn’t remain below my knee, because over time, the pressure of the weights on the tendons and ligaments in my knee could permanently damage it. So, basically, I had no choice but to submit to the King and let the torture begin.

As it had been when Dr. King reset my leg, a group of people entered the room, some to assist in the procedure and others to observe. And just like that previous procedure, Dr. King would keep me conscious during the drilling of the screw and administer only a local anesthetic.

I remember a nurse shaving my thigh, just above the knee. Then, with the help of X-rays, Dr. King determined the proper place on both sides of my thigh to make the cross incision. After a local anesthetic was injected, my thigh was rubbed down in iodine. Then, after a few minutes and a, “Can you feel this?” test, the surgery began.

I didn’t look. I couldn’t, but I remember seeing the doctor grab the scalpel in my peripheral vision. I remember the sensation of blood running down the side of my thigh as he made the incision on the right side of my thigh, and then the left.

I seem to have blocked this part out, but I’m pretty sure a power drill, similar to the one used to drill screw holes in studs, was what drove the stainless steel screw through the flesh and bone on the right side of my left thigh and out the bone and flesh on the other side. I didn’t feel pain, but I felt the sensation of it, my bones vibrating as the screw penetrated it. It’s unlike anything I’d ever felt from deep in my bones, literally.

When the drilling was complete, the screw was cut at either end then each end was capped off with a rubber tip, which protected me from cutting myself on the jagged end of the screw. Following the procedure, the new screw was rigged up with weights and pulleys and the whole system was reconfigured. In fact, this process may have taken longer than the surgery itself.

This Polaroid shows my leg in traction. Notice the screw just above my knee (and my emaciated leg).

This marked the second time Dr. King had surprised me with an unexpected procedure. When he had to reset my femur, I just chalked that up to an honest correction that was as much of a surprise to him as it was to me. But Dr. King had known all along that he was going to have to move that screw and he never told me until just minutes before he did it

In hindsight I understand why he did this, because it saved me the dread and anticipation of awaiting the day that he moved the screw. It’s like the nurse counting to three before giving you a shot, but inserting the needle on, “Two.”

However, at the time, this second surprise made me suspect that there may be more in store for me than the doctor was telling. As much as I pressed him to let me in on what was happening, never again during my treatment would I believe he was telling me the whole truth about what lay ahead.

At the time, I was going to Catholic Church and I believe I was admitted to the hospital as a Catholic (a line on the admission form). I’m not sure when it started, but a young Catholic priest named Father Peter began to visit my bedside every week or so to try to provide me with words of encouragement from the scriptures. During one of his visits, it may have been his first, he suggested that I try to focus my suffering on prayers for someone in need. He was asking that I act Christ-like, and I have to admit it was a lot of pressure to put on a fifteen-year-old kid. But at the same time I figured, “What the heck? If I’ve got to be locked up in this miserable place, I might as well try to help someone out.”

I’m not sure if I immediately knew whom I would pray for, but I decided on someone fairly quickly. My friend, Rich Hoyt, and I had been through a lot over the two years we’d known each other. I could probably write a book about our suburban misadventures together, but this particular story has nothing to do with any of that. I wrote earlier that the only thing I remember about the day of the accident was talking to Rich on the bus ride home from school, then flashes from the ER. We were very close friends, in spite of, and perhaps because of, the different social circles we associated with at school.

During my time in the hospital, Rich hit a bad patch. I’m not quite sure of all of the details, because I wasn’t around, but at some point he ran away from home. Recently, my mother reminded me of this incident. I had forgotten that, at the time, she had asked me if I knew where Rich might be, because no one knew where he was. I told her that he might be at “the green house,” which was what we called this abandoned, decaying, green, cinder block house that stood in the middle of acres of undeveloped land adjacent to our neighborhood, New Sherwood Forest. It’s not easy to find, but the parents found it and there they found Rich hiding out, tired and hungry.

But that wasn’t the miracle. That was just a hunch I had, because we spent some time there over the previous summer and it might be where I would have gone, had I the urge to run away. By the way, no one could hide there today. It and all the beautiful land around it, like most of my childhood escapes, have been overtaken by suburban sprawl.

It must have been because Rich was suffering like this that I decided to focus my prayers on him. I was very concerned for him and afraid of what might happen next if he didn’t get help. So I prayed. I remember not being able to find the words, because I wasn’t sure what I wanted for Rich, except for him to be safe and to stop acting out like he was.

Within a few days or possibly a week after I started praying for him, I was informed that Rich had overdosed and was being admitted to Forsyth Memorial Hospital, my hospital. My initial reaction was concern for his well-being, but once I learned he was okay, I was kind of happy. “Rich and I are in the same hospital! I’m not alone in here! Cool!”

Then it hit me. Was this the answer to my prayers? I did pray that Rich would get help, that he would be safe and that he would stop acting out.  All of that would happen now that he was in the hospital’s substance abuse wing, or whatever sterile name they gave the facility. Maybe. Maybe my prayers were answered.

The next time I saw Father Peter, I reminded him of what he had asked me to do – use my suffering to help someone in need. After I told him that I had prayed for my friend Rich and what had happened, Father Peter’s face lit up. He was a very young guy. It’s tough to give an exact age, because when you are fifteen, anyone who is more than a few years older than you is an adult. They’re all old. Some are just older than others. At least that’s how my mind worked at the time. But my guess is Father Peter was about 25.

For a young priest, this had to have been cool. Go to work at the hospital. Tell a kid to quit his whining and focus his energy on praying for someone in need and Boom! Not only does the kid do what you asked, but he may have gotten some results.

Father Peter was very happy when he left my room that day. I felt good for having made him feel so good.

The following Sunday, my mother, went to Mass at Saint Leo Church. Father Peter, who was new at the church, began giving a sermon about a young boy he had met at the hospital who was recovering from a terrible accident. As the story unfolded, my mother realized that Father Peter was talking about me and my prayers and Rich.  I remember thinking how cool it was that my story had become the subject of a Sunday sermon.

I opened this part of the story explaining that I’m not sure I believe in miracles. I’m not even sure what happened between me, Father Peter and Rich qualifies as a miracle. Perhaps it might, if after entering the treatment facility, Rich had gotten clean, went back to school and continued on to a long and fulfilling life. If maybe, just maybe, my prayers had set all of that into action, one could call that a miracle.

But that’s not how things happened for Rich. He continued to battle addiction and the unspoken ghosts from his childhood for the next fifteen years. There were high points, and low points in his life, but Rich never fully recovered. I have moved past my temporary setback of a broken femur. Now, it just makes for a great, and emotional, story. Rich suffered in ways I have never suffered and for reasons I will never understand, although I have my suspicions.

On New Year’s Day, 1999, Rich was shot in the stomach at his home and died, days later, in ICU at Forsyth Memorial Hospital. The official cause of death was suicide, but I have my suspicions and I am not alone.

I don’t think about my moped accident anymore, except on occasion during the fall around the anniversary of the day it happened. But there aren’t many days I don’t think about Rich and how much I miss him. I do wish my prayers had actually had the kind of impact I thought they’d had back when I was in the hospital. I wish some divine force had intervened in Rich’s life. Perhaps then, I might believe, without a doubt, in miracles.

If there was any positive side to me being strung up in this hospital bed, it was that all was forgiven.  I was not being held to account by anyone for anything I may have done in the past, including steering my moped into a flat bed truck at 30 miles per hour.  I would not be grounded for this.

While I hated being in the hospital and thought about how much I hated it nearly every waking moment, and sometimes in my dreams, I took some comfort in the attention I was receiving from everyone in my family, and from friends and neighbors.  I will write later about how touched I was by the outpouring of love and kindness I received from my family, my girlfriend, neighbors and friends, some of whom sent letters from thousands of miles away and shared words of love and support.  I had never felt such expression of love from so many at one time and it really gave me perspective on how much I mattered to the people in my life, many of whom I had not spoken to in years.  More important, I realized how much the people in my life meant to me.

So, as unpleasant as it was to be in this situation, I did feel loved. . . and maybe it spoiled me a little. Because while I was all wrapped up in, “Whoa is me,” and “Aren’t I lucky to be alive!” land, everyday stuff like, say, school, had been all but forgotten.   “School? I’ve got more important things to do like heal my leg so I can walk again,” was basically all I’d thought about school.

But once I was out of the woods and on a clear path to recovery, I was informed that a tutor from the Winston-Salem Forsyth County School District would begin coming in three days a week to provide me with assignments from my teachers at Mount Tabor High School.  Upon hearing this news I was a little disappointed. My initial thought process went something like this:

“Tutor?   You mean I have to go to school?   Haven’t I suffered enough?  After all, it was kind of a miracle I survived, right?  Maybe we could call 10th grade a wash and just let me take some time off to recover.  If that’s too much to ask, then let’s pick school up again maybe after Christmas break.   I’ll probably be on crutches then, but I’ll be mobile and in a much better space to deal with things like pop quizzes, homework and exams.”

But it didn’t take long for another thought to enter my mind, a much more realistic and troubling thought.  I was going to miss about a quarter of the school year.  Without a tutor, I could have easily fallen so far behind that I might have had to repeat the grade.  I wasn’t going to let that happen, so I embraced the tutor.  The idea of a tutor coming in to my room for an hour or so every couple of days was still better than actually going to school for six hours a day, 5 days a week.

David Priddy, the tutor, was probably in his late 40s or early 50s.  He was a big man with thinning brown hair, who dressed like you might expect a traveling teacher to dress.  He wore casual slacks, button down shirts, which were occasionally covered by a sweater vest, and brown rubber-soled shoes.  I don’t remember that much about him really, except that he was very nice.

He would bring me my assignments, which were mostly reading assignments, but there were some written reports assigned, as well.  My teachers gave him the assignments and I always wondered exactly how this worked.  Did he drive to Mt. Tabor and meet with each teacher, individually?  Did the teachers drop the assignments in a special box in the main office, where Mr. Priddy would retrieve them?  I have no idea.  I just know, from having seen notes from my teachers attached to the assignments he handed me (after removing the notes) that he was in communication with them.  I could have asked him how this all worked, but I never did.  I didn’t ask a lot of questions back then.

An unexpected aspect of being “back in school,” is that it gave me something to do besides watching “The Price is Right,” and “Press Your Luck”.   I had reading to do. I had Spanish to learn.   I had algebraic equations to solve. So, unlike before the accident, I took time with my studies.  I did the readings as they were assigned, not on the night before the exam.

And I enjoyed learning in a way that I hadn’t before.  I felt like I was doing it on my time, not the teacher’s time.  If I didn’t want to read a chapter in my history book at noon on Wednesday, I didn’t have to.   I could do something else and read it later, when I felt like it.  This isn’t to say that I loved reading a high school history text book, but it did allow me to focus my attention on something besides my situation, which is pretty much all I had been doing prior to Mr. Priddy becoming a regular visitor.

Also, I never asked, nor was I ever told for certain, but I am convinced my teachers took it pretty easy on me.  I felt that Mr. Priddy had been given a bunch of “soft-ball” assignments, which he passed along to me and I knocked out of the park. I was grateful that my teachers, even those who seemed to have no heart, like Mrs. Harvey and Mr. Adams, had mercy on me.   Even they could see that I had suffered enough, that I had bigger things to focus on than the anatomy of a bullfrog and that I was just trying to get back to normal.  So I guess even my teachers gave me a pass.

I asked him what this meant, “Like do you mean you have to re-break it?” And he said, “Yes. I’ll have to reset it, so that it heals correctly.”

“So, does this mean that we have to start over? I’ll be here at least another three and a half weeks?”

He responded with something direct, like, “Yes. I’m sorry. It does.”

I was pretty pissed, but I didn’t really have time to dwell on it, because I had to face the immediate reality that he was about to break my semi-set leg.

There were a couple nurses and at least one other medical staffer in there, but I have no idea of everyone’s role in the procedure. Some medical students may have been there, as well. On more than one occasion, medical students were brought in to observe procedures being performed on me. I’m pretty sure I was asked if I was comfortable with the students being present and I never had a problem with it. I was happy to help aspiring doctors learn from my injury, and I was so uncomfortable being in the hospital that a few extra people in the room weren’t going to make the experience any worse.

A local anesthetic was injected into my thigh and Dr. King said I might feel some sensations, but that I shouldn’t feel any pain. I don’t remember all that happened during the resetting of my leg, but I do remember thinking the first thing he did was kind of primitive. The doctor gripped my left thigh with both hands and I could see that he was feeling for the exact location of the break. When he finally found it, he placed his left hand under my thigh and his right hand on top – one hand on either side of the break.

He grimaced as he strained to re-break my leg. There may be a medical term for what he was doing, but basically, he was breaking a partially set femur with his bare hands.

The entire time that I was watching him do this, I thought, “This is insane. He is going to break my leg and I’m completely conscious!”

After shifting his hands a few times, like someone trying to find the right grip on a sealed pickle jar, he finally got the bone to give. I’ll never forget the feeling of the two ends of my broken femur moving around within my thigh. The ends occasionally rubbed against each other, as he manipulated them into the correct position.

There wasn’t any pain, but just a very odd sensation. My leg wasn’t supposed to move there. The knee – of course, that was flexible. But my thigh had always been rigid. It was as if suddenly I had a new joint. This feeling was beyond surreal. I can still feel it today if I think about it. Once he reset the leg, he manipulated the weights, ropes and pulleys of the traction contraption, so they were properly set, as well.

As difficult as it is to describe this physical sensation of the re-breaking of my leg, it’s even harder to explain the psychological impact it had on me. By this point in my recovery, I knew what had happened to me. I knew I had been in a horrific, life-changing accident. I knew that I had broken my leg, but I didn’t remember any of it. I still don’t. I only remember flashes of being in the ER and then nothing until a few days in when I was somehow aware that I was in the hospital and why I was there. My leg may have hurt during those first few days, but I never really felt it, because my brain shut down. This may have been a defense mechanism, to protect me from actually experiencing such trauma, but I never felt the break.

On the day that Dr, King reset the break, I finally felt the break. I finally felt the magnitude of the injury. There wasn’t any physical pain, but there was a deep psychological pain. It’s impossible to put it into words, but I was upset that my bone had to be re-broken, frightened by the size of the break, relieved that it hadn’t been worse, overwhelmed by how bad it was and guilty for feeling so down, when others were worse off than I. And there was the indescribable, primal feeling of fear and confusion over the sensation of two ends of bone rubbing against each other. It’s something I hope never to experience again.

Halloween in the hospital was depressing, as was most everything else, come to think of it. Cheap drug store decorations were hung in the hallway outside my room. I could hear the nurses decorating the nurses’ station, although I could only imagine what it looked like – orange and black streamers, synthetic spider webbing strung badly across file cabinets and computer monitors, a cardboard skeleton pinned to the wall and of course a bowl of candy corn on the counter surrounding the station.. I think I was served a piece of yellow cake with orange and black frosting on it as dessert with dinner.

Catherine brought me a Halloween card, as well as a button she had picked up at Bennigan’s restaurant. It had a folk-art depiction of Frankenstein’s monster with the words, “Be Scary,” written beneath it.

There was a deeper reason for her giving this to me than it was a cute Halloween gift. During this time period, I had a fixation with the word “scary”. I used it to describe pretty much anything. While I realize that it may have appeared to have a limited vocabulary, the truth is that I always got fixated on certain words, which I’d rotate in and out of my conversational speech. Anyone who knows me knows of this particular trait I possess.

People who knew me when I was around ten might remember made up phrases like, “Sucker Jay” or “Mama Johnston,” which mean absolutely nothing. I just liked the rhythm and the way they rolled off the tongue.  In junior high and early high school I was fixated on “deeds,” “dude,” and “scary”.   Apparently I had no worries or concerns over how randomly using these terms as substitution for a more appropriate word might make me look like a complete jackass and probably, often did.  Then again, I was just a teenager.

Over the years, I’ve refined this, or so I think. For example, today I use the term, “curious,” whenever someone mentions some interesting factoid.  I am actually mocking those pretentious enough to sincerely use the word in such a context. However, since I reflexively use this word now, I am sure there have been times when I’ve responded, “Curious,” to a statement someone has made in a group of people, causing someone in the group to wonder, “Who is this pompous loser?” So in this regard, I haven’t changed all that much. The words I use have changed, but I am still the jackass who uses his own quiver of random words in curious ways. But at least I refuse to use terms like, “circle back,” “touch base,” and “reach out,” in business.  Never – unless I am making fun of those who do use these terms.

Anyway, since I was using “scary” for approximately every other adjective during this time, Catherine saw this button at the restaurant and correctly assumed that I would get a kick out of it. So she got it for me. It made me think that perhaps some people enjoyed my bizarre fixation on these words. Okay, they may have tolerated this trait. Regardless, I enjoyed this Halloween related gift that had an inside joke attached to it.

In the early evening, a group of children with the Boy Scouts or an elementary school or a church or something visited the pediatric ward. They came wearing costumes and bearing candy. I think these kids told ghost stories, too, which was kind of weird. Here I was, at least five years older than these kids and they were trying to tell me scary stories. There was nothing scary about them. The greater irony is that if I were not in the hospital, I would probably be out scaring kids their age.

After listening to these not scary stories, the kids left and the night became pretty much like any other, although I looked out the window more than once and imagined all the fun my friends were probably having that evening. In spite of how great it was to have visits from loved ones and strangers on that day, for me it was the worst Halloween of my life and so remains to this day.

Every morning at around 7:30, the nurses would come in and greet me with a thermometer under my tongue and a check of my blood pressure. My father would usually arrive sometime after my morning check-up.  He kept me company through much of the morning routine.

The breakfast tray would arrive with  food that, on the taste monitor, fell somewhere between airplane food and K&W Cafeteria food.  My dad would joke about the food with some dry comment like, “That looks delicious.”   Then we’d hear the guy knocking on each hospital room door asking, “Mornin’ paper?” in a thick Southern drawl. We’d here him getting closer and closer until he finally reached my door, then we’d hear his voice begin to trail off down the hall.  I never accepted his offer to purchase a copy of the Winston-Salem Journal, so I don’t think I ever saw his face. But I’ll never forget his voice or his morning ritual.  My father and I still joke about the “Mornin’ Paper?” guy.

My dad usually left  by 9AM or so and headed off to work.  Sometimes my mother visited in the mornings.   Other times, I’d be on my own, but never really alone, since the nurses were always there if I needed anything.  And mornings were typically an active time for nurses with regard to visiting the patients.

At some point Dr. King, the greatest orthopedic surgeon in The Triad, would enter on his morning rounds. (By the way, he’s the doctor who treated the foot I broke while doing donuts on my moped a year or two prior to this.) He was a fairly reserved young doctor who seemed to take some pleasure in my misfortune. I know that this is not true, but when I was 15 and imprisoned in that hospital room, Dr. King represented the warden to me. He was the one coming in every day to check my progress. He was the one who would decide when I was ready to be released.  He held my future in his hands.

So I always tried to be positive when he visited. But for most of the time I was in there, I rarely received good news. His original prognosis was that it would take 3 1/2 to 8 weeks for my legged to be healed enough to be put in a leg cast and for me to be discharged from the hospital. In the end, I was there for just shy of 8 weeks.

Over the first couple of weeks I think I asked him nearly every day, “So, how much longer will I be in here?” and I’d receive a vague, evasive response. Often, he’d offer sage advice like, “David, this is a challenging time for you, but you will learn so much about patience.”  He may have been correct, but I wasn’t really listening.  Eventually, I stopped asking every day about my release date and only asked every other day.

After Dr. King left, the nurses gave me a multi-vitamin and other meds, if I was on them.  I was on painkillers for the first few days. I was placed on a stool softener during my second or third week, which I remained on for a bit too long. . . more on this later. Also, every few days, at this time they’d change my sheets and/or offer me a sponge bath, which I’d give myself.  Although there was one nurse that was very persistent in trying to give me a sponge bath. I’ll address her more later.

I’d watch game shows nearly every morning. Press Your Luck will always remind me of my time at Forsyth Memorial. Peter Tomarken and the Whammys provided me much comfort.

After a little more TV and/or homework, lunch would arrive. Often there was  a lonely patch of time between lunch and the time I’d get afternoon visitors. There were no game shows on to provide some escape from my situation, only soap operas.  Remember, cable was fairly new in 1984, and my TV picked up about 5 channels via an antenna.  There wasn’t much to distract me from my reality.  I was confined to a bed, in a room, with no memory of what happened to put me there.

Sometimes my mother would be visiting, so I wouldn’t go through the afternoon doldrums.  But often I spent an hour or two alone until my mom came or school let out and Catherine would arrive with a card or some other thoughtful gift and a smile.  I’d get other non-family visitors, too, but Catherine was almost always there, nearly every afternoon, even after drill team practice.

Any visiting family members and Catherine usually left around dinnertime. For Catherine, it was to go home, eat, study and spend time with her family, but for my family it was often to get themselves something to eat. They’d usually return and we’d spend evenings watching TV, or a movie (I had a VCR), or talking about news from the neighborhood.  I felt pretty far removed from normalcy, so these stories tended to make me a bit homesick.

The nurses were pretty lenient with my family regarding visiting hours, but after the first few days, my family usually left when visiting hours were over. Then I’d watch an hour long drama and go to bed at around 11:00. I watched a lot of St. Elsewhere, which provided comfort in a strange, “I’m sort of living this TV show,” way.

Basically, this was my routine for nearly eight weeks. However, there were plenty of disruptions to this routine along the way. . . some good. . . some, not so much. (To Be Continued)

I have no idea why my rattled brain decided to speak Spanish, but I am sure the EMTs were confused – “The kid has blond hair, blue eyes, pale white skin, but speaks Spanish?” Neighbors at the accident scene, who knew me, identified who I was, since I was not myself at that moment.

My moped was totaled. Those who saw it told me that it was a twisted heap of metal, the handlebars and front wheel pushed back to the saddle. Apparently, a very kind member of the Winston-Salem Police Department wrote me a ticket for driving an unregistered, unlicensed vehicle without a driver’s license. Later, he dropped the charges. I’d like to think he decided to drop the charges after his wife said something like, “Don’t you think this kid has learned his lesson? Do you really need to be that big of an as#$@le?”

There was blood everywhere. Three of my front teeth had ripped through my cheek, which created a bloody mess. Blood pooled around my head, so that no one was sure if I had received a massive head injury. I remember being shown the clothes I was wearing that day. My yellow Polo button-down shirt was shredded (from EMTs cutting it off of me) and no longer yellow. It was brown with dried blood – over 90% of the shirt was covered in blood. My jeans looked equally as bloody.

I had been told I was lucky to be alive. I wasn’t wearing a helmet and doctors were shocked that I did not have a more severe head injury. I was lucky I wasn’t paralyzed. I was lucky that the most major injury was a broken left femur.

Also, I’d knocked three of my front teeth through my face. Ultimately, the teeth would die and each would have a root canal. In addition, I suffered unexplained cuts on the tops of my left and tight hands. The scars remain to this day and forever, I guess. But the femur was the focus of my treatment at this time. These other injuries were incidental in light of having broken the thickest bone in the human body.

For all of this talk of how lucky I was, the truth remained that I had a stainless steel screw through my shin – in one side an out the other. The screw had ropes and pulleys and weights attached to it.  My left shin and thigh were in slings.  I was in traction. I would be forced to lay on my back, 24/7, for the next 50+ days. By the way, this is not how this injury would be treated today. Today a massive incision or two would be made in my thigh. The bone would be set with rods and pins. I’d be put in a soft cast and sent home on crutches the same day. They might keep me in the hospital for a couple days for observation due to the head trauma. I would be left with a massive, unsightly scar on my thigh forever. I’m not sure which is worse, nearly two months in the hospital with minimal scarring or a lifetime with an unsightly scar on my leg. Considering the old way also provides a good story, I guess I prefer it.  (To Be Continued. . .)

My mind was altered for several days. I don’t think the doctors did a very good job of diagnosing just how bad my head injury was. Perhaps they did record that I had suffered a severe concussion, but I don’t remember any talk of my head injury. It was all about my leg and the hole I had in my face, just above the left side of my upper lip, where three of my teeth had punched through the flesh.

It’s difficult to know exactly when my brain started functioning normally again, but I have little memory of my first 3 1/2 days in the hospital. Apparently, I was talking to everyone, although on my first night in the hospital I continued to scream profanities at the nurses. An exchange my mother likes to share goes something like this:

ME: THIS PLACE SUCKS!!

NURSE: (uncovers the sheet from my right foot, examines foot) Why honey, you’re not even wearing any socks.

I remember an orderly bringing me breakfast on Saturday morning, nearly 4 days after I was placed in the hospital room. I remember accepting all of this as normal, even though I didn’t remember the previous few days in that room and I wasn’t sure of how I ended up there. The best way to describe this feeling is that it is similar to the day you become aware that your parents are your parents. No one remembers that day, if there even is one. Your parents are just your parents. This feeling was similar. I simply understood that I was in the hospital and the room was familiar to me, even though I had little memory of my time in it.

I had no memory of entering my hospital room on the first night, when I was wheeled into it on a gurney. The room itself had become familiar, but I had no idea what was outside of my doorway. So for the entire time I was in the hospital, I was left to imagine what the nurses station looked like, where the elevators were and where my room was in correlation to the other rooms on my floor. I wouldn’t even know what floor I was on, if I hadn’t been told. There was a world outside of my hospital room door, but I had no idea what it looked like.

This might make a thought-provoking postmodern, German play. Curtains open to a man in a room with no clue of how he got there and no way to see what’s outside the room. Throw in some monologues pondering the meaning of one’s existence and maybe some mimes and you might have something. But this was no avant-garde play. This was my reality and I was 15. I didn’t care to ponder my existence. I just wanted out. And I couldn’t focus too much on the fact that I had no idea what the hallway outside my room looked like. It was just too bothersome of a thought, but it was always in the back of my mind.

I got to know my room very well. It was 25 years ago, but I can still see the horrifying painting on the wall just beyond the foot of my bed. Because I was 15 and technically still a child, I was placed on the pediatric floor with pediatric decor. It was all giraffes, ducks, flowers and pastels.

In the case of the scary art on my wall it was a scene from a gruesome fairy tale painted by what I would guess was a generous high school student, who graciously donated it to the hospital. It was the stuff of childhood nightmares, scarier than the clown painting that adorned the wall of Greg, Peter and Bobby Brady’s bedroom wall. Scarier than the similar clown painting my brother, Tom had hanging on his bedroom wall, as a child.

On the wall just beyond the foot of my bed was a portrait of a scene from “The Gingerbread Man,” the classic children’s tale of a gingerbread man who taunts hungry children as they chase him and try to catch him so they can eat him. The image depicted three children chasing the Gingerbread Man down a wooded path. The Gingerbread Man had a big frosting grin on his face and his arms raised above his head pushing out his cinnamon candy buttoned chest. The kids looked rabid. . . possessed . All had open mouths and demonic eyes that were fixated on the prize, the delicious ginger humanoid cookie that magically ran in front of them, while mocking them in song, “Run, run as fast as you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the Gingerbread Man. . .”

So amateur was the depiction that the perspective was distorted. At the top of the painting was a tiny cottage, then a larger green pasture, then some trees, then the path, followed by these kids who grew in size from back to front, because of this odd perspective. The gingerbread man was huge in the foreground. It was as if at any moment he would leap off the canvas and taunt me with his mocking song, knowing full well there was no way I could run, or even crawl after him. Bastard.

I’ve always wondered why anyone would have thought it was okay to put such a frightening image on the wall of a child’s hospital room, besides the obvious reason that for whatever reason a lot of stuff geared at kids, like fairy tales, clowns and Santa Claus is scary. It just hit me. That gingerbread man is forever frozen in that scene. He is forever being chased by those kids. He’s forever on the run. Imagine the hell he’s in. And that’s the point.

I may have been in a pretty bad situation being confined to my hospital bed for all of those days with a broken leg, but things could be worse. At least I wasn’t in the perpetual nightmare world that the gingerbread man was doomed to remain forever. So perhaps the painting was meant to be an inspiration – “Look kid, you got banged up. But you’ll get out of here one day. Not the Gingerbread Man. He’s screwed. So perk up!”

Still, I hate that painting.

The rest of my room was basic hospital room stuff. My bed was by the window. There was a TV mounted to the ceiling in the corner between the wall with the window and the wall with the awful painting. There was another bed to the right of mine that was occasionally occupied during my stay, but not during the first week or two. To the right of the other bed was the bathroom, which I never used or even saw from the inside. The door to the hospital room was on the wall opposite the window. It would be a long time before I knew what was beyond that door. (To Be Continued. . .)