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The Slice: First trips to the ER
Readers shared stories of their first trips to the emergency room.
“I was 8 or 9 years old,” wrote Hank Greer. “My friends and I were playing 500. I was trying to catch a fly ball, which would’ve scored 100 points. I missed the ball and it hit my glasses, which cut my eyebrow.
“Facial wounds bleed a lot and this was my first so of course I thought I was dying. I was not about to go gentle into that good night, so they immobilized me at the emergency room by cocooning me in a sheet. Then someone held my head still while the doc closed up the wound with two stitches.
“I got better.”
Kath’ren Bay-Higdon’s first trip to the ER was prompted by her first kidney stone. “Even after having two babies naturally, that pain was the worst ever! Over the next few years I repeated that same emergency room experience five more times. Those folks are my best friends – they and the dilaudid.”
Susan Johnson was 11 or 12 when she fell out of a giant weeping willow in Metaline Falls. “I grabbed a dead branch which gave way and I plummeted to the ground after a brief bounce off the roof of a teardrop travel trailer.”
She heard one of the kids looking at her say, “Get your dad, I think she’s dead!”
For a moment, she couldn’t see or speak, so the same thought crossed her mind.
“The only doctor in town, good ol’ Dr. Hammerstrom, came in his woody station wagon (the ambulance), loaded me onto a wool blanket sling for the four block trip to the hospital where he found only a mild concussion, cracked rib, and bruised kidney. I got a lot of attention, especially from the property owner.”
Then there was this. “Your warm-up question in (Thursday’s) column reminded me of my first visit to Sacred Heart’s ER with my teenage daughter,” wrote Robert McGinty. “Kelly was riding my Honda 110 trail bike near home when she was hit by a drunk driver, ending up in the ER and being stitched up by Dr. Mac whom she now works with as an ARNP in that same emergency room.”
Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. I’ll bet you can’t even remember the last time you used a 50-cent coin.