Guess what I did last night?! I broke my foot. How you ask? I fell out a window on the second floor. Coolest broken foot story ever right? I’m like the Jennifer Lawrence of Tilburg lately; accident prone and constantly falling. And you know all this has made me realize? You use your feet for absolutely everything. Now, I got lucky because I only broke my left one, and the right one is just bruised, but according to the first doctor I had, if I was a heavier human being, I would’ve broken my spine. Isn’t that cool? The marvels of Physics.
So let me rewind a little bit and explain the fun bits. I fell out the window, and then got up and sat down on the edge of some planters. Both my feet were in extreme pain but being me I’m all like: it’s totally fine! Just a bruise. 10 mins later and I’m being carried to my room while we wait for a taxi.
Now I know you’re all sitting there wondering to yourselves “how on earth does someone fall out of a window?!” If you come up with a good answer let me know, because I’m still trying to figure it out myself. In my defence, the windows are really big and we sit on the edge of them, as well as the fact that it was raining, so it was super slippery. It really isn’t more exciting than that.
So I get carried into the taxi by Rupert and Dom, and then Katie, Sam and I go to the hospital. Sam turns to the Taxi driver and is like “the hospital please” and I kid you not this dude BOOKED it. Like… I’m not bleeding, I’m still conscious, there really was no rush. He could’ve gone normal speed, but oh well. Fast was fun.
I really owe everyone involved in the shenanigans while waiting around at the hospital because they really kept my spirits up. Katie was playing with the hospital gloves etc… Which is something my father would’ve done had he been there with us.
So I get some x-days, and I broke my left foot (the heel part). Of course seeing as my sister has a weird obsession with injuries (it’s her profession so I guess it’s not that weird – sports med), I had to get some print outs of the x-rays to send to her. And then the doctor was all like “We need to make sure nothing has happened with your spine so we’re going to watch you over night.” Great.(Note the sarcasm.) To make things even more dramatic, they don’t have overnight people at the hospital I was at, so an ambulance came and picked me up. Like legit, I was strapped to a board and driven to a bigger hospital so that they could watch me sleep.
At this point Katie and Sam went home, because I felt really bad that they stayed the whole time with me. Talk about hijacking someone’s night… The EMT that rode in the back with me was really super friendly. She was watching Friends on Netflix when she was called in to come get me. Of course I felt bad, because I hate making a scene and felt this was exactly that, but she was cool! She has a younger sister that plays women’s basketball professionally in the US. Now that I think of it, I actually know a lot about this woman from a simple 15 min ambulance ride. She’s only been an EMT for 8 months, but worked in emergency rooms before that, and in some pretty cool countries too. Her and her boyfriend have traveled a lot.
So we get to the bigger hospital and I get my own room. Being me, I had to pee a million times. It got to the point where the nurse on call just left me a wheel chair because I could deal with it by myself. At this point I’m hella tired, but I can’t sleep until a new doctor sees me yet again. Talk about drama. I feel like this whole thing is made to be way more complicated than it really is. I already have a cast on, just let me sleep.
When that doctor was done I was finally allowed to go to bed. Of course now that all the exciting things have ended there’s nothing left to think about – which naturally made the pain in my foot absolutely unbearable as I now had nothing to distract me from it. That, and my foot started to swell inside the cast. It was basically the whole immoveable-object meets-unstoppable-force and it kept me up all night. That’s actually not an exaggeration for once. I started to fall asleep around 6 am to be woken promptly at 8 by the nurse/doctor switch.
Now what. Now… nothing. I sit in bed, waiting for someone to tell me I can go home. It doesn’t happen. Instead, I meet doctor #3 and #4 who have decided that I need a CT scan to get a better picture of the break. They also casually throw the word surgery around, and I just get super quiet and nod, but then they don’t think they’ll need too, they just wanna play it safe. So I’m like “Awesome! Quick CT and then I’m out of here. I could be home by lunchtime!” Wrong. I basically sat around twiddling my thumbs until 12:30 when a man came and took me to the CT scanner thingy.
I have never been more uncomfortable in my life. Instead of letting me lift myself onto a wheel chair (which I do anytime I have to pee), he decides we’ll just take the entire bed. No big deal. Hospital is busy, and the CT scanner is on a different floor in a completely different wing of the building. Now everyone expects hospitals to be filled with older generations, so when they see me they all look at me as if I’m the recently rescued abused puppy. I’m also covered in a blanket, so they can’t actually see what’s wrong with me, which is worse, because I can see behind their beady little eyes they’re all trying to figure out what’s wrong with me.
At some point when I was left (still in my bed) at the waiting room, a woman came up to me and muttered something in Dutch. Already embarrassed and super tired I just kind of make non-committal grunting noises and you can just see the hope extinguish in her face. It’s as if she thought she was talking to a living corpse. This place is driving me nuts. Although it’s really giving me a new perspective on illnesses.
When the dude turns on the CT scanner it makes that weird rumbling noise that laundry machines make when you put too much into them. Oooo and there were red lasers that made x’s over my cast so that he could line things up. I’m easily excited.
And then, back to my bedroom after parading around the hospital. I had a class at 4:45 and when they took the scans at 12:30 I naturally thought “Hey! I’ll be out of here before then! I might even make it to class!” Nope.
Apparently I need to spend another night. Why you ask? No one knows. I’d call the nurse and ask, her answer is consistently “Sorry, I don’t know. While I’m here let me stab you with this needle.” So yet again I’m stuck, bored in my room. At some point a woman came and brought me some detective novels, but they’re so bad I couldn’t even make it through the first chapter. And then the best thing ever happened. Dom came and visited! I probably would’ve gone mad if he hadn’t shown up. To make things even better, he brought my laptop, toothbrush, a change of clothes, and basically everything else you need to survive in a hospital. Made my night. Baby Blaise if you’re reading this; thank you so friken much you beautiful man. He biked 6 km in the rain just for me. What a gem.
Breakfast at 8 am as usual. Promptly followed by the most pathetic attempt to shower. Like… it was a struggle. THEN THE DOCTOR CAME BACK. Bliss. Apparently we’re waiting for a specialist to review my CT scans, and then I can get out of here! It can’t come soon enough. I’m starting to lose my mind.
So now I’m sitting in fresh clothing, in a clean bed, with clean hair. Today is really starting to look up. Hopefully I’ll be asleep in my own bed tonight! Fingers crossed.
Fun social experiment (due to being bored). I’ve been snap chatting while here (because what else do you do in a hospital?) and I put my broken leg in my snap story. It got 42 views, 3 of which were family (so we’ll exclude them). Out of the 39 people about 10 of them sent me messages asking what the deal was. Sooooo basically I have a 25% return rate on people that care about my broken leg enough to text. Does that mean that 75% of the people you meet in life just kinda fade away? Not guna lie, but it seems about right… Interesting. Maybe I’ll write a masters on it someday, but probably not.
PS. If you’re wondering why I basically have no pictures of my own, it’s because when you go to a hospital you don’t usually bring your phone charger.
