Hi.
I am cranky as all shit, and on drugs. If you say anything that even remotely has a whiff of advice about it, I will lose my shit. You might think that I appreciate your wisdom, but you would be very wrong. Seriously, I am not even slightly fit for human interaction and I used up all of my patience dealing with medical people today. What I want right now is a Vosges Mo’s Bacon Bar and to be left alone. Oh, and dinner at Porterhouse Bistro, except with a restaurant buy out so that nobody else is eating there.
Friday night we were on our way to the kid’s show (she is on light board). We were making our way to the theater in rainy stop and go and crawl and rush and creep and go and stop traffic. The car in front of me stopped. I stopped. The driver of the Nissan Pathfinder behind me was looking away in hopes of changing lanes, and utterly missed the lack of continue to go.
BANG
Ugh.
Cranky.
The first thing I did after making sure that Z and I were OKAYish, and the other driver was okay and not a hit and run sort, was twitter “Car accident. Fuck.” which wasn’t really about being geeky. I didn’t have time to call A yet, and my tweets go to both his cell and computer, so it was the easiest way to try to quickly give him a heads-up. It had the rather strange added side effect of telling 50 other people about the accident almost as soon as it happened.
The guy was polite, a bit overly chatty, licensed, and insured. To illustrate the overly chatty, I can tell you he has three daughters in their 20s, he recently was laid off, and he was on his way to an AA meeting. Police stopped by, FIRST stopped by. Actually, FIRST blocked traffic enough for us to make it off of the freeway and into a parking lot, so that we could more safely exchange info. That was also as far as Mr. Pathfinder could drive. His transmission was not behaving normally, and it looked as though his radiator was cracked, but they could not look inside to see because the hood wouldn’t open anymore. He also had several chunks off of his car that he gathered up off the freeway, like sad toys, and tossed into his backseat. He requested that FIRST call him a tow truck.
We decided not to do the ambulance thing, for reasons that I am not going to to bother justifying, but there are reasons and I stand by them. As we were close to the theater, and I needed to figure a bunch of things out, I went ahead and drove there and let the kid do the light board thing.
I sat in the parking lot and looked things up on my phone and made some phone calls. I put in a call to her orthopedic sports medicine specialist back in California, and was able to exchange messages and he wanted her to have x-rays done. I tried to look up urgent care information, but the phone is very limited. The show soon ended and we made our way home. She was hungry, so she had some dinner, while I found the closest urgent care that accepted our insurance and verified that they offered x-rays. Some do not. By this time I was definitely experiencing pain. I had not immediately following the impact. My intention was to go ahead and get us both checked out, although honestly, had she not been hurting, I would not have bothered to go just for myself.
We decided to wait until A got home since I didn’t really feel like driving. He got home, we made our way to the urgent care place and had trouble finding it. We finally got there, and they had closed a few minutes earlier. I had misread their hours and they are only open from 6 PM until 9 PM. We went home so I could look up other places, but all of them were already closed. A few were open as late as 10 PM, but too far away for us to get to in time. At this point I was in a lot of pain myself, was tired and stressed and pissed and really just fucking hating being in Minnesota instead of California, where I would have been able to deal with this with so much less effort.
It was a night of not going smoothly, from the new (no choice in the matter) health insurance website, to the car insurance website, to urgent care, to fucking everything. I just wanted to be HOME, and by that I did not mean the fucking rental house.
Anyhow, we determined that it was definitely not an ER level situation and we did ice and some meds and some bed, with plans to do Urgent Care the next morning at the place that opened earliest.
Which, is what we did.
It took hours.
A few parts stand out.
The nurse handed me the thermometer and said “Just put it wherever it’s comfortable.” I kept my mouth shut, but Z and I traded looks.
X-ray techs really rub me the wrong way. When Z was done with her set of films she came out and said, “So… radiology departments just universally suck.” I couldn’t argue.
The doctor came in after looking at the x-rays and was concerned by something she saw on Z’s and wanted us to wait longer so the radiologist could review it before we left. The radiologist ended up clearing her, and all was well, but it wasn’t a very fun wait, especially for Z.
Anyhow, x-rays showed no injury to the bones. It is all soft tissue stuff, and just needs time to heal. Ice. Muscle relaxants. Ibuprofen. Time.
She has a lot of soreness in her neck and shoulders, as well as some in her lower back. I have some soreness in my neck, but it is really pretty good, as long as I don’t tilt it or turn it. I have more pain in my lower back, plus my arms, pectorals and hands hurt.
When all meds are on board I feel pretty damn okay for about an hour, and then I want to sleep. Mostly we have been sleeping the day away, and drinking a lot of water because we feel very hot and parched.
Unfortunately my husband goes out of town tomorrow. I’m really not looking forward to dealing with dog walks yet.
So, yeah.
How is your weekend?
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