At this point I wasn’t sure if I broke anything, I did know that I was in a lot of pain. This was during the era when not everyone owned a cell phone. Luckily one of our player’s, house was right next to the playing field. He went home to call for an ambulance, while the rest of the team tried to give me first aid. They had realized that something was amiss. It wasn’t long before the fire department’s rescue vehicle turned up, my arm was immobilized and I was put into the ambulance. Dennis, the player who made the call, decided that he would ride with me in the ambulance. Mack decided that he would drive Dennis’s car and follow the ambulance to the hospital so that Dennis and I would have a ride home. This wasn’t totally altruistic on Mack’s part. He was pleased that this also got him out of having to go home early (since the game was cancelled) and have to mow his lawn which is what his wife had requested of him that morning.
I always have appreciated the fact that ambulances can go very fast, get to run lights, bypass slow vehicles, and generally seem to be good for people that are in need of medical attention. I should say that I did appreciate it until I was the one sitting in the ambulance with a broken collarbone and bouncing around with every rut in the road.
The rest of the time at the hospital, though long, was not very interesting. It was my right collarbone, so filling out paperwork was not high on my list of things to do (I’m right-handed). Thank you Dennis and Mack. Remember that t-shirt that I was so proud of having. The only way that they could get to x-ray my arm and see where the damage was, was to cut off my t-shirt. So much for that shirt. I didn’t even keep it, which is a shame, since it would have been a great memento. I wasn’t thinking of mementoes at the time. It was pretty chilly in a hospital that was airconditioned with no shirt on.
Collarbones are interesting parts of our bodies in that they can’t be cast when broken. The doctor who attended me, when he finally showed up, took one look at the x-ray, told me that I had broken my collarbone, told a nurse to put my arm in a sling and sent me home; he’d see me in a few weeks. This part took approximately 5-10 minutes. Well he sort of sent me home. He said I could go home after the sling was put on, but there was still all that paperwork to fill out.
We eventually went home, but since I lived by myself, it didn’t seem a wise idea to send me to my home, so instead I went to a friend/colleague’s home where I would enjoy being catered to by he and his wife over the next few days residing in their master dining room on a portable bed.
Now came the time where I have to decide who to tell about this injury. My mother lived about 75 miles away from me in the Bronx. She was 71 years old and lived by herself. She didn’t drive, or have any means of transportation other than public (which at that time she never used, she only relied on others) I did not want her to worry. Since I normally didn’t visit her that often and called her on the phone at least once a week, I decided I could get away with not telling her about it, until it was healed (about 6 weeks). My two sisters, I decided I would tell, as long as they didn’t tell my mother. Both of them lived near each other, one in New Jersey and one in New York, just over the New Jersey border.
Who else I would tell and what I would tell was a different matter.
continued on part 3 – http://www.hdhstory.net/Storyblog/?p=15
