Broken, Part 2

Okay, so my right butt-cheek is up on my hole-puncher, which has me a bit skewed and, strangely, more comfortable. On to Part 2. where we are now beyond the mere exposition of my sordid story, and on to reflection.

One thing that came home to me almost right away, and which will be the focus of this post, is the importance of friendship, and what a huge difference being laid up has on it. I've been thinking a lot about the following country song the past few days:

Run your car off the side of the road
Get stuck in a ditch way out in the middle of nowhere
Get yourself in a bind lose the shirt off your back
Need a floor need a couch need a bus fare

This is where the rubber meets the road
This is where the cream is gonna rise
This is what you really didn't know
This is where the truth don't lie

{Chorus}
You find out who your friends are
Somebody's gonna drop everything
Run out and crank up their car
Hit the gas get there fast
Never stop to think 'what's in it for me' or 'it's way too far'
They just show on up with their big old heart
You find out who you're friends are

Everybody wants to slap your back
wants to shake your hand
when you're up on top of that mountain
But let one of those rocks give way then you slide back down look up
and see who's around then

This ain't where the road comes to an end
This ain't where the bandwagon stops
This is just one of those times when
A lot of folks jump off

{Chorus}

When the water's high
When the weather's not so fair
When the well runs dry
Who's gonna be there

{Chorus}

I enjoyed the song before I broke my leg-- but since then it has been pretty much my anthem. You don't know until you've been there, just how much you crave human contact in the hospital. Sunday was the worst day for me because it had virtually no visitors, and Monday night/Tuesday wee hours of morning was a journey through Hell especially because I was alone.

There are two friends who were especially found out over the course of the week. First, and i might add foremost, was Sierra. Now, I'll grant that that doesn't look so good on my seminary resume, putting a girl as a foremost friend... smacks almost of that forbidden fruit: romance. I assure you, though, there's pretty much nothing romantic about clinging to the only vines life offers you in a pit of vipers, be it the Ivy of Love or not.

In any case, after all the help Sierra has given me in holding on to my sanity this week, it would be first-order incivility not to acknowledge it. It's amazing how, over the course of a hospital stay, someone can go from being "a good friend, one of the people I like to hang out with at school, someone I can get along well with" to "definitely one of the best friends I have".

I'm a little queasy writing this, since about a week before the fall I gave Sierra the address of this page, and I've always been rather careful, for whatever the reasons, to avoid telling people how much they mean to me-- I guess I'm always afraid of finding out I don't mean a whit to them.

In any case, Sierra remained level-headed through the episode of collapsing, calling the ambulance, and helping keep me warm (though that was a futile effort, I suspect, on the part of all involved...). She then came in the ambulance, and stayed with me all through my trip to the ER, the X-rays, and finally to my assignment of a room at 8:00ish.

The other great friend I really discovered this week was Chris. Chris, to give some backstory, is one of the other seminarians in my position: year one of Philosophy at Concordia, and so we've spent a fair bit of time together. He's not what you'd expect of a close friend of mine, if you were to judge by me-- our personalities are hugely different, but we get along well, and he was there for me the entire time. It was through Chris that word reached the seminary about me. Due to the fact that I don't have a phone, I haven't really bothered to learn any of my companions' numbers, and I've never learned the business numbers... and while I have the residence number memorised, that's something of a useless number in an emergency, since it's pretty much a one-way street to the answering machine, which is checked maybe daily. It seemed rather futile to me to try and leave a message there if another way could be found.

Fortunately, Sierra and Chris are also classmates and friends, and had exchanged numbers at some point, so she was able to phone him and he, after he finished his exam and got the message, was able to pass the word on to Fr. Stephen, and then show up at the hospital to join Sierra in her bedside vigil (she had also, by this time, been joined by her ride home, Brandon, who went from a friend of two minutes to a friend of me in my trauma). Chris also remained with me until after I'd been settled into a room for the night.

Between the two of them, Chris and Sierra formed the bulk of my visitorage (to invent a term) throughout the next few days. They certainly logged the majority of the hours, and I would have to say that I lived for their visits (often in tandem, Chris driving them over from Concordia).

It's impossible to express fully just how important BEING THERE is to a hospitalised person, to a person in pain. The pain I could deal with, easily, as long as I had company. Saturday, brutally painful though it was, is a day I can look back on with something resembling fondness, because there were people there for me. "Shared joy is twice the joy, shared pain half the pain."

Another really good sentiment is the idea (which I think I've seen expressed in someone's online signature) that there is no mathematical way to express the difference between one and two. It's the difference between one and an infinity.

I also really came to appreciate Fr. Marco this week... some of the seminarians have butted heads with him for his stricter tendencies--and there's no denying he prefers a well-run ship and has an older-fashioned approach to things, but you will never, after this, hear me speak a word against him. (Mind you, I got along well with him, being a rule-abider by nature.) He was there every day this week, bringing me communion, making sure I was getting better. I felt, moreso than with anyone else from the seminary, that I was missed, that I was a lost sheep and that I was being brought back home. I truly felt that I had a shepherd.

The responce coming back home to the seminary has been awesome as well--I know which of the guys I can depend on. The help I've had today, with meals and errands and tasks, has been incredible.

I'm afraid my mind is starting to wander as my butt gets worse and worse, and I think I should probably take off. I may or may not write further installments about my week in hospital. I feel I've kind of poorly done this post, but there's nothing to be done about that at the moment...

Pray for me-- tomorrow I have to venture out again, and talk to my profs.