Chapter 8
The county hospital lights were brighter than the clinic's. They hummed louder too.
They'd wheeled me in on a cot with rails up. The sheet was white like before but thinner and colder. My shorts rode up and the gauze they'd wrapped over my shin was already sticking. I kept my hands on my knees. The blue splint wasn't on me anymore. It was in a clear plastic bag on the chair by the wall. I could see the black straps through the plastic.
A different nurse came in. She wasn't the woman in scrubs from the exam room. She had short gray hair and her badge said ER RN and she pulled the curtain closed behind her.
"Hey there," she said. "I'm Karen. I'm going to take a look, okay? Same as before, nice and slow."
I nodded. My throat felt dry from the ambulance ride.
She washed her hands at the sink and snapped on gloves. She didn't touch the bag. She knelt so her eyes were level with mine, not above me.
"Can you tell me where it hurts most?" she asked.
"My shin," I said. "Where the blood is."
She smiled a little, just with her eyes. "That's a good way to say it. I'm going to take this dressing off now. You'll feel it pull. You can hold my wrist if you need to."
The tape made a soft ripping sound. The gauze had stuck where the blood dried and she used a wet pad to loosen it. I breathed through my nose and watched her hands. They were steady. When the last layer came away, air hit the wound and I flinched.
She didn't say ouch for me. She just looked.
The bruise was dark purple and green around the edges, scraped open in the middle where the skin was gone. Blood had crusted along the lower edge and the knee was swollen so the shape looked wrong.
Karen kept her voice even. "Thank you for letting me see," she said. She measured it with a small paper ruler and wrote numbers down. The ER doctor came in while she was doing it. He was tall and had a mask pulled down under his chin.
"I'm Dr. Patel," he said. "Karen's going to let me take a peek too."
He didn't touch right away. He looked, then gently pressed above and below the wound and asked if it hurt when he did. I said yeah. He nodded to Karen.
"Pattern's consistent with a direct impact and abrasion," he said quietly to her, not to me. "Not a playground fall. We'll need films."
They brought the X-ray machine to me instead of making me get up. A tech in a lead apron slid a flat black plate under my leg. It was hard and cold.
"You'll hear a beep," she said. "Don't move your leg, even if it hurts. Just count to three with me."
I counted. One, two, three. The machine beeped. She did it again from a different angle. The tech showed the screen to Dr. Patel across the bay. I couldn't see what was on it, just gray and white shapes.
When they were done, Karen covered my leg again with fresh gauze, looser this time. She tucked the sheet around me.
Dr. Patel came back with the images on a tablet. He turned it so Karen could see but I could see too. The bone was white and the tissue was gray. He pointed with his pen but not on the screen, just in the air.
"You see the soft tissue swelling here, and the bruising pattern lines up with the surface wound," he said to Karen. "No fracture line that I can see, which is good news. But the force was significant. This isn't what we see with a trip on the sidewalk."
Karen wrote that down. I didn't understand all the words but I understood his tone. It was the same tone the first nurse had when she pulled the blue splint away and went quiet.
The caseworker from before was standing outside the curtain now. I saw her shoes first. She came in and stood near the bag with the splint.
"Your dad's talking with the social worker in the family room," she said to me. "He's not in here. You're safe to rest."
I looked at the bag.
"Can I keep it after?" I asked. My voice was small and the lights hummed over it.
Karen followed my eyes. "The blue splint?"
I nodded. My hands tightened on the sheet.
"My dad gave me those colors," I said.
Karen glanced at the caseworker, then back at me. She didn't take the bag or push it toward me.
"I hear how much those colors matter to you," she said. "We have to keep it safe for now, but it stays with your things. Nobody's throwing it away."
Dr. Patel pulled the curtain a little more closed and said to Karen, "We'll classify this as a non-accidental concern for now. Clean the wound, update tetanus, no weight bearing tonight. Admit to peds for observation and photo documentation in the morning."
Karen nodded and wrote that down too. She put her hand lightly on the rail, not on me.
May you like
"We're going to take good care of that leg," she said to me. "And you get to keep telling us what you need, okay?"
I kept looking at the blue through the plastic. The straps were still buckled the way I'd left them. I didn't want them to take the colors away. I just wanted the hurting to stop and still keep what my dad gave me. The fluorescents buzzed and the gauze felt clean and the bag stayed on the chair where I could see it.
