I am a Christian. I’ve accepted the Lord as my savior in my heart and soul. But before you stop reading this, figuring it’s written by a born-again Holy Roller, wait until the end and then decide. This is a story that I can hardly believe myself.
On the first day of April this year, my eleven-year-old son and I set out from New Jersey, for a long weekend in northern Florida. My husband was working every day of my son’s spring break, so we left him home to tend to the dog and cats and get decent sleep, which he usually doesn’t. The day started late, and we hit a lot of vacation traffic around Baltimore and Washington, D.C. I decided to go to south of Richmond and stop for the night.
Further down I-95, I spotted a sign for Starbucks and I’m a Starbucks addict. We drove down the road and must have missed it, so I turned around to head back to the highway and decided to stop at a gas station to fill up before heading south. I pulled in an Exxon station and realized it was self-service in Virginia and since I was paying cash, I had to prepay. So I left my son in the car and walked across to the small mini-mart. And then it happened.
The curb was especially high, around twelve inches and there was no red or yellow paint to bring it to customer’s attention. I tripped up the curb and instinctively put out my left arm to brace my fall. I heard a loud crack and felt excruciating pain go down my arm. At first I shook it off, but when I went to pay for my gas, I realized how bad the pain was. I’m a chronic pain patient and live with pain every day, but this was the worst pain I’d ever felt in my life. Not wanting to ruin my son’s vacation, I shook it off. Conor, my son, got an ice pack from our Igloo and that alleviated the pain while it stayed cold. But the pain continued. And it was my eleven-year-old son who had the sense to say “Mom, we’re going to get off the next exit with an “H” on it.
But the difference between a child and a mother with seventeen years of nursing experience is that I knew that not all “H”s were alike and I didn’t want to end up in a bad hospital. My son spent his time using my phone to Google hospitals and he came up with Stanton Medical Center, in Stanton, Virginia. As the road crested, I saw a beautiful big hospital. And a lot of hospitals can learn from Stanton. Everyone from the security guard, to the P.A. who treated me was so nice that I was able to keep a cheerful smile on my face, until I had to have X-rays, and that’s when I cried, because it hurt so much. I worked with a lot of people with broken bones during my career, but I never realized just how painful they can be. I hope I was as gentle and caring as the staff was with me at Stanton.
