Broken bones

Whoops, I guess I didn't keep my promise to blog more often....

Yesterday one of my best friends broke three bones in her wrist. Ouch. Needless to say, her misfortune reminded me of when I broke my wrist. It's a little weird actually, we both broke our left wrists when we fell off our bay mares, but Elizabeth definitely hurt her wrist more. Although I managed to sprain my ankle at the same time that I broke my wrist. When I fell I thought I had broken my ankle, since that hurt more than my wrist. But since I pretty much hit the ground face first, I was more concerned with the fact that my  mouth was full of arena dirt. And yes, I do realize that I am one of the most elegant and classy people alive. Generally I'm pretty against going to the emergency room, I've always taken the view that if some ice and tylenol helps you feel better than the ER just isn't necessary. On this occasion however, I decided that since I could barely walk or move the fingers on my left hand, that the ER might just be a good idea. Little did I know that the next 24 hours would be quite interesting.
When I got home and informed my Dad that we needed to make a trip to the ER, the next thing I asked him to do was to ask him to zip up my sweatshirt, because by that point I didn't have any function in my left hand. Never have I ever felt more like an infant than having my Dad zip my sweatshirt up. So we get to ER, check in, and they immediately take my blood pressure and whatnot, so at this point I thought that this whole thing would be over quickly. Oh how naive I was. After that they sit me back down and I must have waited for 2 or 3 hours before they actually called me back. And it's not like they were attending to people left and right, there was barely anyone going back into the actual hospital. I contemplated faking chest pains to see if that would move things along at all, but decided that I might get in trouble. When I finally did get to go and have X-rays taken my wrist was really swollen and my ankle hurt so bad that I could barely walk, but the oh-so considerate nurse just kept walking down the hallway in front of me, occasionally looking back at me like "Hurry up gimp I've got work to do." So after the X-rays were taken they put my in one of those stalls and a bed and a curtain. And, of course, they made me put on one of those backless gowns, even though what they had to deal with was not even remotely covered by said backless gown.
By this point I was very annoyed, tired, and shamefully enough, slightly emotional. What made this whole situation even worse was that there was a deranged lady screaming "I DON'T WANT THEM PUTTING ANY TUBES IN ME TO KEEP ME ALIVE!!!" a few beds down. This did very little to reassure me that hospitals are a place of healing. So while the very nice murse(male nurse) was putting a splint of my arm that went form my fingertips to my shoulder, I kept berating him with inane questions about how long it would take to heal. He couldn't tell me anything, but instead asked what happened. So I had to tell the story for about the 34th time. It was at this point that they decided to give me some pain meds. I think they were really trying to get me to calm down, but the pain meds just made me more loopy, so when the doctor finally got there I was getting to be quite a handful. I'm not talking yelling or breaking stuff, but I was really anxious to get out of there so I was really insistent on getting some answers. I couldn't count the number of times the doctor asked "Are you sure you didn't hit your head?", because I'm sure he thought I was crazy at that point and was just looking for an excuse to validate my behavior. But no, I was not acting that way because I hit my head, I was just being my lovely, graceful self. 
We finally left the ER at about 11:30 with me in a giant splint, sling and ankle brace and headed home, but not before we hit the Walgreens prescription drive-thru. Classy stuff right there. I'll leave the actual cast stories for later, I figure this is enough crazy for one post.

Also, am I the only one who is disappointed that real-life doctors don't look the doctors on Grey's Anatomy? It would make the waiting much more bearable.
Leah