lickhaven

A weird week, this one.

The fracking about 200 yards up the hill from us has provided a loud, constant thumping, overlaid by a low roar, that’s driving us all batty. Yesterday was the first time that Tigger, our cat, stopped being afraid to come in the house. Marigold, the dog, is having problems with her left hind leg that may also have to do with her back.

And Tuesday, Linda woke up with a broken wrist. How did this happen? Good question.

Monday evening we spent in extensive sampling of her excellent orange wine. It was theoretically not quite ready to drink, but that didn’t stop us, because it’s delicious and powerful as all hell. Orange wine? Yes, made from frozen OJ concentrate (the one time we used fresh-squeezed oranges, it came out not half as good).

So Linda’s wrist looked badly swollen in the morning, but she had no memory of falling, and I had no memory of waking to any loud tumble. We’ll never really know what happened, though a later discovery suggests one possibility. I’ll come to that further down, because our most remarkable time was the three hours in the emergency room in Towanda, 20 miles north of our place

We got there around 11 am. Linda checked in while I parked, then we sat for maybe 15 minutes in the odd L-shaped waiting room. Not having anything else to read, I started counting the signs on the walls and doors. I came up with 19, but probably missed a few.

One huge panel of 2-inch hand-painted letters listed all the things one must not do while waiting, such as assaulting anyone or using foul language. Apparently the ER folk get some mighty obstreperous wounded. The largest hung sign had the smallest type but was placed at least 7 feet above the floor. Maybe it had something to do with basketball; no way to tell from below.

The main entry door – labeled “Automatic Caution Door” – was so automatic that every time a husky young teen in the chair nearest the door waggled his foot, the door would swing open and shut. Naturally, that became something of a ongoing game.

But the fun really started when I noticed the doors leading to the medical area, posted with

Stanley

DO NOT

ENTER

OK, I figured “Stanley” was the door manufacturer, but the arrangement flipped my humor switch. When a nurse came by with an icepack for Linda’s wrist, I asked her, “Why don’t you let Stanley in there?”

To our delight, she hopped right on it. “Oh, Stanley was really bad. We can’t let him in for 6 months. You know what he did? He threw his icepack on the floor and it exploded all over the place!”

I don’t know whether other people had asked the same question, or she was just amazingly quick, but now I felt we were going to love this place.

Linda behaved with her icepack, so she was taken back for an Xray, after which we waited while it was being read, then both of us were ushered into a hallway, where Linda lay on a bed, her arm in a sling, and I got to sit on a folding chair. We were close to a much larger set of swinging doors, but these were controlled by slapping a big square protrusion on the opposite wall – with its roughly dozen non-public signs.

The largest hanging “sign” was a clear plastic sheet fastened over a complicated schedule chart covering meetings and goals. One square section was labeled “Huddle Group.” Ummm…

It was obvious that some kind of marker was intended to be used on the plastic, then erased, but none of the labelled squares or rectangles had anything written over them. When I asked a passing tech if this chart had ever been used, she said “Not yet.” 

The most intriguing wall sign requested, in 23 various languages, that anyone needing an interpreter point to that language to ask for help. One the languages was labeled “Karen.” Again I stopped a passing nurse or tech, “What kind of language is Karen?” “No idea.”

(Looking it up at home, turns out it’s a whole linguistic grouping used by about 4.5 million speakers along a north-south shoelace in southeast Asia. It’s good to know things.

Each time I got up from my chair I found myself in the way of some machine being trundled along the corridor. I suggested that I be given my own sign: “Obstacle.” Within this constant parade of little machines, each had a singular, obvious purpose; in mass, they somehow signaled chaos.

The nurse we dealt with most, Heather, openly enjoyed being helpful and never looked pressured. When she and the others heard that we couldn’t identify the origin of Linda’s wrist break – because of the delicious orange wine – they asked not that we be more abstemious, but rather, “Why didn’t you bring us any?” 

Next, the physician in charge, Dr. Khare, joined in. Turned out he is also a winemaker and was fascinated by the idea of orange wine. But now was the time to actually do something about that wrist. So Linda sat up while half a mile of Ace bandage was wound around her lower arm, which was again dropped into the adjustable sling.

No cast, at that time, she was just told to hold her wrist as high as her heart. (The cast came three days later, after our usual 40-mile drive to the main hospital in Sayre.)

We had a fair amount of waiting around in that corridor, but we could hardly conceive of better treatment. All hail the ER!

Yet the pleasant aftermath to an unpleasant night did not end there. We decided to get something to eat at 2:30, having had no time for breakfast. Where? We decided to see what we could find on Main St. in Towanda.

First we tried Vincent’s pizzeria, a terrific place. Not open till 4 pm. So we settled on a lovely little café, the Community Cup, on the next block – light and inviting, with a wide-ranging menu on the wall featuring fresh ingredients.

Right-handed Linda decided a sandwich would be easiest to eat left-handed. What, she asked the woman at the register, would she recommend? “The BLT is the most popular,” so we both settled on that, though I’m not a big fan of BLTs.

What we got was the thickest and best – if also the highest-priced – BLT we’d ever eaten. And my tea was served in a cup of near-boiling water: as it should be, but seldom is.

We were the last customers of the day, so the register lady stopped over to chat: It soon became clear she was also the owner. She told us her name was Joy Harnish, a retired Sullivan County teacher, and that she recognized Linda as a fellow former teacher, even remembered her name and, with a bit more mental searching, that she taught reading. From the founding date noted on the café menu – 2013 – she must have started the business the year before retiring from teaching.

So we closed out the daytime Tuesday saga on another high note. That evening I found Linda’s mangled copper bracelet, which she always wears on her left arm, by the corner of the bed, next to her bureau. I think that may explain her fall. Maybe the bracelet caught on the bureau corner and dropped her into a spill that she tried to stop with her other hand.

Still, we’ll never know for sure, which just makes the whole thing that much more intriguing.