Tuesday arrived, at last. I was eager to find out what exactly was going to happen with my finger. By then I began to worry it would start healing the wrong way. I still didn’t feel any pain, just discomfort from the splint. I didn’t go crazy with research on the internet; just read random stories on online bulletin boards that hadn’t been updated in years. Saw some disturbing pictures with no context. But I stayed away from WebMd. All I really wanted to know was that people broke and twisted their fingers and they still healed, and they went on to play tennis, or do whatever they were into, and forgot all about it.
I spent over two hours at Highland Hospital waiting room on the seventh floor. A story about a bomb scare in Manhattan was on the news, on repeat. Why not show a documentary about dolphins? A trail of weed smoke and a few whispers filled the space. The warning sign by the bathroom door — something about infections — deterred me from drinking any water. I used a hand sanitizer every time I touched any door knobs, elevator buttons, or pens at the hospital.
After two hours, a nurse ushered me into a smaller waiting room, with three other patients, where I waited for another thirty minutes and tried to distract myself with an anatomical map of a foot on the wall. Or was it an arm? A back? I couldn’t find phalanges on it, so stopped paying attention to it.
While I was waiting in what felt like a purgatory of the orthopedic department, a tall man in a white frock, probably in his early to mid-seventies, rushed through. He had neatly combed grey hair, big, pronounced facial features, and looked like a Hollywood’s Golden Age star. I liked him because he reminded me of my music school director back in Georgia, who used to run up and down the school stairwell in a hurry and shout in his low baritone at nervous students standing in the narrow dark hallways, waiting for their turn at a recital: “Take it all in! Enjoy these moments! This is what life is all about!”
Was it though? Here I was, two decades later, in a strange hospital, surrounded by strange people, far away from everything and everyone I knew, with a broken finger, having forgotten how to play piano. How did I get here?
Before my mind could go any further down the existential journey, another door opened and this time a friendly man in his fifties with a ponytail took me into the cast room. He asked me to lie down on a bed at the very end and relax. The last thing I want to do is to relax, I thought.
The room looked like a wide hallway with beds arranged on one side and tables and equipment on the other. All curtains between the beds were pulled back and it smelled of chloroform. It was getting late in the day and there were only a couple of other patients in the room.
A young orthopedic surgeon in scrubs, who looked Indian or maybe Persian, came in. He was upbeat, smiled, and moved with ease. He asked me a few questions, including what I did for a living. I told him I was an unemployed marketer and I didn’t have any insurance since I lost my job a few months earlier, when the company shut down their California office. I hated every minute of that conversation. At that moment my entire existence was reduced to “another immigrant, a victim of crime, unemployed, uninsured.” I was a burden on society. Never mind all the years I worked, paid for the insurance I hardly ever used, paid my taxes religiously, and volunteered. None of that, or anything else, mattered in that moment — because none of it was in that room.
A female physician assistant, in her early thirties, joined the upbeat doctor. She was the most competent person in the room, recording the information and planning the logistics. I called her Ms. Competent and the young doctor Mr. Cool in my head. They were moving around with forms and talking about me in a third person, like I wasn’t there. Then another man in a white frock came in. He wasn’t the vivacious Mr. Hollywood I’d seen in the purgatory earlier, as I had hoped, but rather a grumpy eighty-something year old, who leaned on his cane and walked past me without noticing me. Dr. Grumpy, I called him, held his cane tightly with a bruised hand and went straight to the computer where my X-ray was on display.
“Well, that’s a bitch,” he said the second he looked at the screen. Dr. Cool quickly mumbled, “The patient is here,” and turned around to face me.
All that holding up for days dissipated in that moment. Tears welled up in my eyes, my shoulders dropped, and that’s when Dr. Grumpy noticed me, to his great annoyance.
Both surgeons stepped toward me and Dr. Grumpy told me to remove the splint. He was as stingy with his words as he was with his movements, like he was trying to preserve every ounce of himself. I struggled with the splint and Dr. Cool helped every now and then. Dr. Grumpy stood there, staring at my hand. I was slow and careful, and that drove him crazy. “Just take it off,” he finally said, impatiently. I felt terrified, and thankful for Dr. Cool.
My hand looked red and purple, with wrinkled skin and the ring finger hanging crooked to the side. I wanted to run away and leave it there.
“When you touch your finger, do you feel it?” Dr. Grumpy asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Can you lift it up?”
I tried a few times, but couldn’t.
“Just lift it up,” Dr. Grumpy insisted.
I told him I couldn’t move it, but he ignored me. Dr. Grumpy only listened to answers to his own questions, and even then I wasn’t sure he cared. To him, I was a broken and displaced proximal phalanx of the fourth finger on a right hand.
Dr. Cool interfered and helped me cover the hand until one of the technicians would “repackage” it.
Surgery. There was no question about it. Sitting on that awful hospital bed covered in sterilized, yellowish sheets, I heard “insurance,” “calendar,” “November 10th,” “urgent,” “bone healing.” They were trying to fit me in in the following two weeks. They said they would go ahead with the surgery. I would have to straighten out the coverage with the financial assistance office on the other side of the building before the surgery.
The more they spoke, the more anxious I felt. I knew they were trying to help, but their occasional hesitation, pauses, and exchanged glances didn’t assure me of anything. Finally, they told me that Dr. Grumpy would operate on my hand on November 10th.
I was happy to get an action plan. But, Dr. Grumpy? Could he even move his hands? The entire time he was in the cast room he just held onto his cane and slightly moved his left hand from side to side to hurry me up.
“He is one of the best hand surgeons in the world. I work on bigger bones,” said Dr. Cool, who stayed behind.
Here I was in the hands of two surgeons, one mean and dismissive and the other one nice, but with irrelevant experience.
I felt angry. I wanted those kids who jumped me on the street and broke my finger to suffer as much as I was suffering in that moment.
“What will my finger look like? Will it be crooked?” I said.
“Look, I had a few fingers broken, just like you, but now I’m OK,” said Dr. Cool as he held up his hands in fists, like he was hiding a candy in one of them and I had to guess which one. I believed him and hung on to that story, even though he never gave me a straight answer.
The technician, Mr. Ponytail, was back in the room and put a new splint on my hand. It felt too tight and uncomfortable. But I didn’t know what and how my hand was supposed to feel. Was a tighter splint better or worse? Did it help or worsen the fracture to have my right index finger out of the splint? Was there a diet I needed to follow? These and other questions swirled in my head, but no one stayed long enough with me to answer. I spent more time answering questions about the accident and my ethnic background than I did on getting answers about my injury and the healing process. It was five pm, and they wanted to go home.
Ms. Competent came back to take me to another room to cover the surgery day logistics. I was getting dizzy after talking to so many people and felt like my questions stopped making sense even to me.
She suddenly realized that November 10th was Veterans Day, and they would need to reschedule my surgery to November 9th and Dr. Bergman would be performing the surgery.
“Wait, who is Dr. Bergman?” I asked, since it was neither Dr. Grumpy’s nor Dr. Cool’s last name.
“Dr. Bergman is an experienced hand surgeon who has performed many, many surgeries around the world,” she said.
“How experienced?”
“Like 40-years-experienced. And I will be with him in the room,” Ms. Competent said.
“What exactly are you going to do?”
“Well, he’ll either put a permanent fixture to align and hold the bones together. Or, he’ll put a temporary pin that will stay there for a few weeks, while your hand heals in a cast,” she said.
“Will my finger look normal after the surgery?” I asked.
“It’ll probably be 85-90% back to normal,” she said. “Don’t worry. He’s an expert.”
“Is there anything I should do or not do in the meantime?” I asked, still wondering what “85-90% normal” meant.
“No, just don’t use the hand and don’t get it wet.”
Later that day, I noticed that in the paperwork, Dr. Cool was still listed as my surgeon. After all these meetings and conversations, I still didn’t know who would be operating on me.
They assigned a male nurse to help me with the pre-surgery reminders and preparations. The man was a soft-spoken immigrant from an African country. He looked baffled when I asked questions.
“My splint is too tight, it’s hurting me,” I said. Ms Competent called back Mr. Ponytail and they exchanged a look that said, ‘she’s one of those.’ I didn’t care what they thought.
After he adjusted the splint, I apologized for the inconvenience and thanked him.
“Take care now, miss,” he said and rushed me out of the door, before I could ask another question.
On my way out, I instinctively used my right hand to catch my falling tote and got the bag hooked on my newly-freed right index finger. I felt a sharp pain in my hand that electrified my entire body. Since I was still in the purgatory — between the cast room and the general waiting room — I ran back and felt relieved to see Ms. Competent. She didn’t feel the same way about seeing me.
“I think I just did something to my finger. It really hurts, and it didn’t hurt before,” I said.
“Well, you’ve already broken it, so just go home and come back for the surgery,” she said in a matter-of-fact manner, leading me back to the door. She’d had enough of me.
Worried and unsure whether I would get a proper treatment, I walked to the elevator. I watched the twilight pink sky through the window by the elevators and wanted to get lost in its colors. Then, I remembered the imminent darkness of the night and all that could happen, and rushed to get home before its arrival.
The moment my Lyft driver saw my splint, he began to tell me about his chopped finger. He used to be a butcher. He had put his finger back together himself and by the time he got to an emergency room they couldn’t fix it. His finger was fine, just crooked. He hated how he couldn’t hold a fork to eat steak while his finger healed. I tried to look interested with occasional “oh no” and “wow,” but also kept fighting the images of a butchered finger and a fork stuck in a steak in my mind.
As soon as I walked into my apartment and shut the door behind me, I threw my tote on the floor, and collapsed in the corner of my small hallway.
I lost all control. I tried to stay in control for months — through the sudden job loss, through my grandmother’s passing, through ups and downs of the job search. But, the more I tried, the harder it got. And now this. What if I lost my finger?
I looked up, in search of God. I didn’t want to be strong. I give up, I told God. You take over now. I have nothing left, and you have to fix this.
My relationship with God was complicated, and I didn’t know how to appeal. I was desperate. I was scared. I was tired. So, I thought I would get right to the point.
My phone rang. It wasn’t God. It was my friend Liz.
“You’re gonna come out of this. You’ll come out stronger. Believe me,” said Liz. “You know who’s the real victim here? Those kids who attacked you, not you.”
“Yeah, well, they are not the ones sitting with broken bones now,” I said. “It was awful at the hospital, Liz — the way they spoke to me, the way they made me feel. My entire life is reduced to this low moment.”
“No, it’s not. You’ll learn something from this.”
“I don’t want to learn anything. I’m done with learning. I want to be stupid and clueless and be spared from shit like this.”
Liz told me about her low points in life, to make me feel better. It didn’t make me worry any less, but stopped me from wallowing in self-pity.
I went into my kitchen, and decided to tackle the stack of letters, including hospital bills, piling up on my table.
Moments in Words 