Me: Okay, let’s get off this road so that truck doesn’t hit us.
Bike: No. I wanna stay here.
Me: The traffic is too heavy and it’s safer to ride on the sidewalk.
Bike: But I don’t wanna go on the sidewalk!
Me: Come ON!
Bike: NO!

Maybe this title isn’t exactly appropriate. Really, it was a win-win situation. The bike did not jump the curb as planned, and as a result remained in the street while I ended up on the sidewalk with one sprained wrist, one bruised wrist, a sore and possibly fractured scaphoid, and a lovely array of road rash on my hands and knees. It escaped with a cracked brake grip.

I rode home, bruised and bleeding and swearing that I would sell that unruly bike at the next yard sale. It had thrown me onto a rather rough patch of sidewalk, several pieces of which were now stuck in my palms. My wrists were swelling and the pain decreased my mobility to the point that I couldn’t pick the gravel or the torn skin off myself.

I figured Ben still owed me a favor for saving his duvet, and since the injury didn’t seem to merit a visit to the ER, I drove over to his house (an interesting feat given that it was accomplished with only fingertips on the wheel) for emergency intervention without a co-pay. He sat me down at the kitchen table and unwrapped my clumsy bandage job.

“Eew,” he says.

“Thanks. It really hurts.”

“I think I have something.” He gets up, walks over to the refrigerator and opens the little compartment in the door where normal people keep butter. “Here, hold out your hands,” he says.

“Butter?” I ask quizzically.

“Lidocaine,” he replies drily, pouring it into my palms. Ahhh, the blessed relief of hospital-grade anesthetics. I let the cold gel work its magic while he shuffles around in his giant emergency medicine kit, preparing the procedure area.

At this point I have to pause and say that I love my friends. In what other field could I have made a friend who keeps lidocaine in the butter compartment and sterile scalpels in his first-aid bag?

“What do people do when they don’t have friends like you?” I ask him as he begins to scrape the torn skin from my left hand.

“They go to the ER.”

“For THIS?” I’m bleeding and a bit torn up, but it’s not what I’d call an emergency.

“For this and much less,” he says, not looking up as he removes a piece of dirt.

“No offense, but I wouldn’t pay you a $100 co-pay to do this. I’d have taken my bloody self to Walgreens and bought ten rolls of gauze and some tape and then taken my leftover Vicodin.” I smile. “You just happened to be home.”

“Most of the people I see in the ER don’t give us a co-pay or any pay,” Ben replies, wiping off his forceps and adjusting his glasses. “We’re basically the free clinic for the uninsured.”

“But BGH has a free clinic. Why do they go to you?”

Why indeed? It makes me pause even now to recall how Ben details the average patient who wanders into our ER with such acute symptoms as bloody nose (epistaxis) and “I been vomicking” (gastroenteritis). He shoves a tampon up the nose of the first and eventually gets the second to admit that his “vomick” consists mostly of the remnants of last night’s alcoholic binge. These are the people he has to shuffle through every day at work, separating the real emergencies from those who really ought to be around the corner at the clinic – which many people claim to be unaware of in the first place. (“A clinic? What’s that?”) I’m willing to bet that if we took all the clinic patients out of the ER waiting rooms, the wait time for the emergency patient would drop to an almost acceptable level. Right now the average is about six hours – SIX HOURS that I might have had to wait if I had broken a wrist in my fall. The situation as it stands is almost – but not quite – as ridiculous as the time I called 911 for a REAL EMERGENCY (there was a car on fire in my street) and I got a freaking busy signal.

As it is, I’ll take Ben’s diagnosis that my left scaphoid probably has an occult fracture and I ought to keep it wrapped and immobile for a few days. He finishes debriding my wounds and dresses them with antibiotic ointment, gauze and tape. I flex my fingers experimentally and wince a bit from the pain in my left hand. “Keep some ice on that for awhile,” Ben says, indicating my left thumb, which is now sporting a lovely blue tinge above my traumatized scaphoid. “And keep your dressings dry and intact for at lest two days.”

“Yes, doctor,” I say meekly as I gather my things. “And don’t worry, I won’t tell the patients that the free clinic is at your house.”

Because really, if I did that, then I’d have to wait.