The Very True Story of the Scar on my Elbow
I have no life right now. Essentially its Alaska outside and apparently even Mother Nature is so sick of snow she's decided to start throwing ice at Western Massachusetts. I'm not sure what she has against us, but we did something very, very bad to her. Here's what is happening in my life:
1. Not a God damn thing
Right, so that's hard to blog. I thought maybe I'd tell you a story. A true one, too. If you know me (and let's face it... most of you know me) then you probably know this story. And so, I'm sorry mom and sister Kathy. If you want other funny stories instead of this same old, same old... I point you here.
~~~~~
Let's travel back then shall we? All the way to June 2001. I graduated from Westfield State in May and in celebration of that difficult task (you can laugh, its okay) my then-husband Ken decided to take me to New Orleans to celebrate.
Now, let me explain a bit here. Our life then was mostly impoverished, so this trip was 4 days long and on a very, very tight budget. So tight in fact, that we had to go during "the rainy season." During this time of year travelers get to stay at $300 per night hotels for $49!! Wow!!
The issue wasn't our necessary frugality. It was our point of reference. You see, the rainy season in Massachusetts involves rain for a few days followed up with sunshine to dry the puddles. It works out rather nicely and while being forced to stay inside cleaning, its warm enough to keep the windows open. Quite lovely in fact. We knew that New Orleans was situated along the banks of the Mississippi (I still can't spell that without singing the song), but this was also way before Hurricane Katrina. The fear of crazy flooding simply was not on our radar.
We hop onto the plane and take our $79 round-trip seats (that was a total score). We are sans children for a very rare weekend getaway. To say we were mildly giddy is an understatement. The thing with Ken and I was, no matter the state of our marriage, we really did have a lot of fun together.
Upon arriving in New Orleans we are treated to jazz music immediately. There are musicians, singers and tap dancing (I use that term loosely) kids right in the airport. I'm beyond excited. I am here for a simple reason: Anne Rice. This is my pilgrimage, my mecca, my place of worship where I can finally see her muse in person.
We find a taxi and get a great cab driver/tour guide. He talks all the way from the airport to the French Quarter. We understood enough to laugh when appropriate. I have a difficult time with accents - I always end up listening to the sound of the words rather than the words themselves. I find them beautiful and for me, its like hearing a song for the first time. I get the chorus because its repeated, but the verses escape me for at least the first four or five listenings.
The cab takes a left-hand corner from the city part of New Orleans and all of a sudden the streets close in and there's black iron fences and balconies everywhere. I reflect on my intense study of the city (Vampire Chronicles series and The Mayfair Witches series and a few cheesy VC Andrews novels) and immediately point to where Lestat and Louis likely kissed on a corner in the late 18th century. Ken looks like he is ready to crawl under the seat.
We drop off our luggage at the Royal Sonesta Hotel on 300 Bourbon Street. Its 1pm and check-in is at 3pm, so we do what every tourist in that city does: we find the Bourbon Street Blues Company (BBC). Its Happy Hour. Of course its Happy Hour, its always Happy Hour in the Quarter. But this Happy Hour is downright silly with its deal: "Buy 1 Beer for $5, Get 3 Beers Free." It was like we'd died and gone to heaven. Shots were $2. We gave the waitress ten bucks and like magic there would be four beers and two shots on our table.
About forty dollars later (budgets seem less important during Happy Hour), it started to rain. This would be maybe 45 minutes after arriving. We were sitting on bar stools and I noticed a few people started picking up belongings and not touching the ground. That's when I realized that there wasn't a real door to get into the bar, just swingy cowboy shutter things. About a half hour later, we somehow earned the collective nickname of "Boston." This name would stick for the remainder of our trip. The fact that I've been to Boston exactly five times in my life did not matter: If you're from Massachusetts, you live in or near Boston. People started to like us, probably because we were buying rounds for everyone. After a while, Ken's master plan paid off and people started to buy US rounds. And then the waitress (aka "Shot Girl") got super friendly and started giving me free shots. These shots were German and they tasted like grape soda and they came in these adorable little bottles that she would open, pop into her mouth the opening of the open facing out. She would then lean over and pour the contents into my mouth. This was a big hit for the other patrons in the bar. So big, that they started buying more grape shots for us. It was New Orleans, what can I say? You check good judgment with your bags.
It kept raining.
And raining.
And raining.
$120 later (go ahead, do the math - That's either 96 beers or some sort of combination of a helluva lot of beer and a disgusting amount of shots and likely a very large tip) the bar's floor was under six inches of water. We decided that it might be a good time to check into the hotel. This was around 6pm. That's a lot of alcohol for a weekend, but for a few hours, it was the stuff of legends. And Ken and I were nothing if not legends in our own minds. We bid adieu to the BBC (which likely sounded a lot like "Ahhhh dee-youse!") and stepped out into intothe bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, Tropical Storm Allison.
Bourbon Street is difficult to navigate on a sunny day. Its brick or cobble stone or something equally old and uneven and filled with loose things that make people fall. Bourbon Street after $120 at Happy Hour, in the almost dark and under a river of storm water? Its enough to make Indiana Jones cringe. And I didn't have a whip.
You know where this is going right?
I fell. I fell down. I fell down at the feet of a homeless man seated on a milk crate and painted silver (the man, not the crate). He didn't have teeth. I sat there, in the river of disgusting-ness laughing my very drunk ass off. Homeless Silver Man looks down at me and says (insert very heavy NOLA accent here), "You gonna git arrested." Ken is now annoyed because I am making no attempt at getting up and it really is pretty disgusting. The water is rushing down the street and directly up my pants legs and looks more like the Mississippi (yep I sang it again) every minute. I'm up to my waist in this filth. And yet, I laugh.
Ken reaches down to grab my hands so he can haul me up. This is where things went poorly. My hands are soaking wet and kinda slimy to be honest... so I fall backwards. Of course. Huge splash of water. HSM abandons us in case the stupid suddenly became contagious. I land on my elbows. Mostly my right elbow. It is split open and immediately begins to bleed. Not bleed as in "Wow, I could use a band-aid." but bleed as in "Get a bucket/bath towel/stand in the shower" bleed. Its gross.
Please note, we still have to check in. Here. And so, we walk into the hotel which is almost directly across the street from the bar. I am now covered in city dredges of muck, blood, and things that were floating in the Bourbon Street water. I'm still bleeding. And my right elbow has doubled in size already. Ken decides that he'll go right up to the counter and all normal-like get a key to the room. I sit on the silk couch in the marble entrance and notice that "Hey, this fucking place is sweeet!" I decide that out loud, to no one. Of course.
Now, the hotel is large. Many floors and lots of confusing hallways that all look exactly the same. Had Inception been released back then, it would have looked exactly like that. Of course, I'm dealing with some sort of alcohol poisoning and blood loss, but that's what things looked like to me. Ken wasn't doing much better. It took us 45 minutes to find our room. I was cradling my still bleeding arm and trying to get the blood to drip onto my pants because we hadn't the mental capacity to use a rest room in the lobby and get paper towels.
Here's where things get blurry. We found the room. It was still early-ish, perhaps 7:30pm and the rest of the night is a total blank slate. Something about a mini-bar and a lack of a credit card which made us sad. There was something else about a shower and the inability to undress myself.
I woke up in the morning stuck to the sheets. I had bled from both elbows all night long. The mini-bar was upside down and it was partially disassembled. Somehow there was an empty wine bottle in the sink but neither of us to this day remember how it got there. I wrapped the bloody sheets around me because they were really, really stuck to the open gashes on my arms and stood in the shower. As the caked blood was washed away, eventually the sheets fell away and I got to see the real damage. My right elbow wasn't just cut, it was a war wound. It was the type of injury people take pictures of and are scarred for life from. It probably needed stitches. My entire arm was swollen all the way to my wrists and the elbow itself was turning a very interesting shade of greenish-blue. It was probably fractured, but my ER copay at the time was $50. There was no way I was going to waste our precious dollars on that.
I got out of the shower and showed Ken who then pointed to the bed. Now, I've seen horror movies and crime scene tv shows. I know what a lot of blood looks like on a screen, but to actually stand there and see that much blood, my own blood, soaking into a mattress? It was revolting. And it explained the light-headedness that was making my hangover oh so interesting. We were concerned the hotel people might not like this, so we left to find beignets and chicory coffee. Miraculously, the elevators moved during the night to directly across the hall from our room. The same room that took us almost an hour to find.
I self-medicated all day. I started with the Hurricanes at 10am. Mint Juleps at noon. Something green from Pat O'Brien's. By dinner time we knew we had to go back to the hotel and see what the cost was going to be. We walked into the lobby and were greeted with smiles all around. We swiped our card in the door to our room and slowly let it swing open. Shoulder to shoulder, we leaned in unison to peer at the murder scene bed. The bedspread was there, neatly tucked and draped. We peeled it back, eyes squinting and faces wrinkled in anticipation.
It was as though we had never been there.
The mini bar was put back together. The bloody sheets in the shower were gone, replaced by a crisp white collection of bath towels. And there, on the sink was the only acknowledgement of my unfortunate situation: a roll of first-aid tape, a box of gauze pads and three disposable ice packs. On my pillow? A small bottle of Tylenol. And a nip of whiskey. Oh these people were goooood. I used everything they had left for me and Ken immediately tossed a twenty on the nightstand for maid. It probably should have been more, but considering we were down to $200 and had three days left, the twenty was all we could spare.
For the rest of our trip, Tropical Storm Allison stayed with us. We stood in cemeteries, rode the Street Car through the Garden District and gaped at the Greek Revival mansions while shielding our eyes from the raindrops. Our shoes were soaked through. The bottoms of our jeans were dripping wet as we made our way through St. Elizabeth's to see Anne Rice's doll collection. As we found our way to Louis Armstrong park and then Jackson Square, Allison kept up her pace. On the last day, we saw the sun for an hour. I stood outside Lafitte's and leaned against the street sign while Ken snapped my picture. My arm was stuck in a permanent bend, so I casually laid my lower arm across my back so years from that moment I wouldn't remember that my elbow had been broken and medically un-treated for 4 days. What can I say, I was probably drunk at the time and dealing with an incredible amount of pain.
Allison came back though. She waited until we made it to the airport and then BAM! Thunder, lightening, dark rolling clouds fill the sky. She followed us home on the six different planes we were re-routed to. She tossed and shook the 747's so much that the fat guys I was stuck sitting in-between (Ken was waaaay up in front) were kind enough to try to cushion the blows aimed at my elbow from the turbulence. Thing is, when you're sitting in between two dudes who easily weighed at least 350 pounds each, there's not a helluva lot of room left for a broken elbow.
To add to the journey, we had $3.47 when we boarded the first plane in New Orleans at noon. At the time, we were okay with that. We would be home in a few hours and we'd eat then. I kicked back a couple of whiskey sours at Lafitte's and chewed up four Tylenols. I was ready to travel.
We arrived in Bradley airport 14 hours later, hungover, exhausted, and starving. My entire right hand was swollen to the point where I could no longer even move a finger. The only food we had eaten all day were airplane nuts and water. We split a Cinnabon somewhere in Texas after I found a five dollar bill in my back pocket. Honestly, I didn't think we looked that wrecked, but my parents' faces changed my mind on that pretty fast
The next day, I had an x-ray which proved two things:
1. I had a fractured elbow
2. I was bad ass (in my own mind)
And that's the story of the scar on my right elbow.
I hope it never, never disappears.
1. Not a God damn thing
Right, so that's hard to blog. I thought maybe I'd tell you a story. A true one, too. If you know me (and let's face it... most of you know me) then you probably know this story. And so, I'm sorry mom and sister Kathy. If you want other funny stories instead of this same old, same old... I point you here.
~~~~~
Let's travel back then shall we? All the way to June 2001. I graduated from Westfield State in May and in celebration of that difficult task (you can laugh, its okay) my then-husband Ken decided to take me to New Orleans to celebrate.
Now, let me explain a bit here. Our life then was mostly impoverished, so this trip was 4 days long and on a very, very tight budget. So tight in fact, that we had to go during "the rainy season." During this time of year travelers get to stay at $300 per night hotels for $49!! Wow!!
The issue wasn't our necessary frugality. It was our point of reference. You see, the rainy season in Massachusetts involves rain for a few days followed up with sunshine to dry the puddles. It works out rather nicely and while being forced to stay inside cleaning, its warm enough to keep the windows open. Quite lovely in fact. We knew that New Orleans was situated along the banks of the Mississippi (I still can't spell that without singing the song), but this was also way before Hurricane Katrina. The fear of crazy flooding simply was not on our radar.
We hop onto the plane and take our $79 round-trip seats (that was a total score). We are sans children for a very rare weekend getaway. To say we were mildly giddy is an understatement. The thing with Ken and I was, no matter the state of our marriage, we really did have a lot of fun together.
Upon arriving in New Orleans we are treated to jazz music immediately. There are musicians, singers and tap dancing (I use that term loosely) kids right in the airport. I'm beyond excited. I am here for a simple reason: Anne Rice. This is my pilgrimage, my mecca, my place of worship where I can finally see her muse in person.
We find a taxi and get a great cab driver/tour guide. He talks all the way from the airport to the French Quarter. We understood enough to laugh when appropriate. I have a difficult time with accents - I always end up listening to the sound of the words rather than the words themselves. I find them beautiful and for me, its like hearing a song for the first time. I get the chorus because its repeated, but the verses escape me for at least the first four or five listenings.
The cab takes a left-hand corner from the city part of New Orleans and all of a sudden the streets close in and there's black iron fences and balconies everywhere. I reflect on my intense study of the city (Vampire Chronicles series and The Mayfair Witches series and a few cheesy VC Andrews novels) and immediately point to where Lestat and Louis likely kissed on a corner in the late 18th century. Ken looks like he is ready to crawl under the seat.
We drop off our luggage at the Royal Sonesta Hotel on 300 Bourbon Street. Its 1pm and check-in is at 3pm, so we do what every tourist in that city does: we find the Bourbon Street Blues Company (BBC). Its Happy Hour. Of course its Happy Hour, its always Happy Hour in the Quarter. But this Happy Hour is downright silly with its deal: "Buy 1 Beer for $5, Get 3 Beers Free." It was like we'd died and gone to heaven. Shots were $2. We gave the waitress ten bucks and like magic there would be four beers and two shots on our table.
About forty dollars later (budgets seem less important during Happy Hour), it started to rain. This would be maybe 45 minutes after arriving. We were sitting on bar stools and I noticed a few people started picking up belongings and not touching the ground. That's when I realized that there wasn't a real door to get into the bar, just swingy cowboy shutter things. About a half hour later, we somehow earned the collective nickname of "Boston." This name would stick for the remainder of our trip. The fact that I've been to Boston exactly five times in my life did not matter: If you're from Massachusetts, you live in or near Boston. People started to like us, probably because we were buying rounds for everyone. After a while, Ken's master plan paid off and people started to buy US rounds. And then the waitress (aka "Shot Girl") got super friendly and started giving me free shots. These shots were German and they tasted like grape soda and they came in these adorable little bottles that she would open, pop into her mouth the opening of the open facing out. She would then lean over and pour the contents into my mouth. This was a big hit for the other patrons in the bar. So big, that they started buying more grape shots for us. It was New Orleans, what can I say? You check good judgment with your bags.
It kept raining.
And raining.
And raining.
$120 later (go ahead, do the math - That's either 96 beers or some sort of combination of a helluva lot of beer and a disgusting amount of shots and likely a very large tip) the bar's floor was under six inches of water. We decided that it might be a good time to check into the hotel. This was around 6pm. That's a lot of alcohol for a weekend, but for a few hours, it was the stuff of legends. And Ken and I were nothing if not legends in our own minds. We bid adieu to the BBC (which likely sounded a lot like "Ahhhh dee-youse!") and stepped out into into
Bourbon Street is difficult to navigate on a sunny day. Its brick or cobble stone or something equally old and uneven and filled with loose things that make people fall. Bourbon Street after $120 at Happy Hour, in the almost dark and under a river of storm water? Its enough to make Indiana Jones cringe. And I didn't have a whip.
You know where this is going right?
I fell. I fell down. I fell down at the feet of a homeless man seated on a milk crate and painted silver (the man, not the crate). He didn't have teeth. I sat there, in the river of disgusting-ness laughing my very drunk ass off. Homeless Silver Man looks down at me and says (insert very heavy NOLA accent here), "You gonna git arrested." Ken is now annoyed because I am making no attempt at getting up and it really is pretty disgusting. The water is rushing down the street and directly up my pants legs and looks more like the Mississippi (yep I sang it again) every minute. I'm up to my waist in this filth. And yet, I laugh.
Ken reaches down to grab my hands so he can haul me up. This is where things went poorly. My hands are soaking wet and kinda slimy to be honest... so I fall backwards. Of course. Huge splash of water. HSM abandons us in case the stupid suddenly became contagious. I land on my elbows. Mostly my right elbow. It is split open and immediately begins to bleed. Not bleed as in "Wow, I could use a band-aid." but bleed as in "Get a bucket/bath towel/stand in the shower" bleed. Its gross.
Please note, we still have to check in. Here. And so, we walk into the hotel which is almost directly across the street from the bar. I am now covered in city dredges of muck, blood, and things that were floating in the Bourbon Street water. I'm still bleeding. And my right elbow has doubled in size already. Ken decides that he'll go right up to the counter and all normal-like get a key to the room. I sit on the silk couch in the marble entrance and notice that "Hey, this fucking place is sweeet!" I decide that out loud, to no one. Of course.
Now, the hotel is large. Many floors and lots of confusing hallways that all look exactly the same. Had Inception been released back then, it would have looked exactly like that. Of course, I'm dealing with some sort of alcohol poisoning and blood loss, but that's what things looked like to me. Ken wasn't doing much better. It took us 45 minutes to find our room. I was cradling my still bleeding arm and trying to get the blood to drip onto my pants because we hadn't the mental capacity to use a rest room in the lobby and get paper towels.
Here's where things get blurry. We found the room. It was still early-ish, perhaps 7:30pm and the rest of the night is a total blank slate. Something about a mini-bar and a lack of a credit card which made us sad. There was something else about a shower and the inability to undress myself.
I woke up in the morning stuck to the sheets. I had bled from both elbows all night long. The mini-bar was upside down and it was partially disassembled. Somehow there was an empty wine bottle in the sink but neither of us to this day remember how it got there. I wrapped the bloody sheets around me because they were really, really stuck to the open gashes on my arms and stood in the shower. As the caked blood was washed away, eventually the sheets fell away and I got to see the real damage. My right elbow wasn't just cut, it was a war wound. It was the type of injury people take pictures of and are scarred for life from. It probably needed stitches. My entire arm was swollen all the way to my wrists and the elbow itself was turning a very interesting shade of greenish-blue. It was probably fractured, but my ER copay at the time was $50. There was no way I was going to waste our precious dollars on that.
I got out of the shower and showed Ken who then pointed to the bed. Now, I've seen horror movies and crime scene tv shows. I know what a lot of blood looks like on a screen, but to actually stand there and see that much blood, my own blood, soaking into a mattress? It was revolting. And it explained the light-headedness that was making my hangover oh so interesting. We were concerned the hotel people might not like this, so we left to find beignets and chicory coffee. Miraculously, the elevators moved during the night to directly across the hall from our room. The same room that took us almost an hour to find.
I self-medicated all day. I started with the Hurricanes at 10am. Mint Juleps at noon. Something green from Pat O'Brien's. By dinner time we knew we had to go back to the hotel and see what the cost was going to be. We walked into the lobby and were greeted with smiles all around. We swiped our card in the door to our room and slowly let it swing open. Shoulder to shoulder, we leaned in unison to peer at the murder scene bed. The bedspread was there, neatly tucked and draped. We peeled it back, eyes squinting and faces wrinkled in anticipation.
It was as though we had never been there.
The mini bar was put back together. The bloody sheets in the shower were gone, replaced by a crisp white collection of bath towels. And there, on the sink was the only acknowledgement of my unfortunate situation: a roll of first-aid tape, a box of gauze pads and three disposable ice packs. On my pillow? A small bottle of Tylenol. And a nip of whiskey. Oh these people were goooood. I used everything they had left for me and Ken immediately tossed a twenty on the nightstand for maid. It probably should have been more, but considering we were down to $200 and had three days left, the twenty was all we could spare.
For the rest of our trip, Tropical Storm Allison stayed with us. We stood in cemeteries, rode the Street Car through the Garden District and gaped at the Greek Revival mansions while shielding our eyes from the raindrops. Our shoes were soaked through. The bottoms of our jeans were dripping wet as we made our way through St. Elizabeth's to see Anne Rice's doll collection. As we found our way to Louis Armstrong park and then Jackson Square, Allison kept up her pace. On the last day, we saw the sun for an hour. I stood outside Lafitte's and leaned against the street sign while Ken snapped my picture. My arm was stuck in a permanent bend, so I casually laid my lower arm across my back so years from that moment I wouldn't remember that my elbow had been broken and medically un-treated for 4 days. What can I say, I was probably drunk at the time and dealing with an incredible amount of pain.
Allison came back though. She waited until we made it to the airport and then BAM! Thunder, lightening, dark rolling clouds fill the sky. She followed us home on the six different planes we were re-routed to. She tossed and shook the 747's so much that the fat guys I was stuck sitting in-between (Ken was waaaay up in front) were kind enough to try to cushion the blows aimed at my elbow from the turbulence. Thing is, when you're sitting in between two dudes who easily weighed at least 350 pounds each, there's not a helluva lot of room left for a broken elbow.
To add to the journey, we had $3.47 when we boarded the first plane in New Orleans at noon. At the time, we were okay with that. We would be home in a few hours and we'd eat then. I kicked back a couple of whiskey sours at Lafitte's and chewed up four Tylenols. I was ready to travel.
We arrived in Bradley airport 14 hours later, hungover, exhausted, and starving. My entire right hand was swollen to the point where I could no longer even move a finger. The only food we had eaten all day were airplane nuts and water. We split a Cinnabon somewhere in Texas after I found a five dollar bill in my back pocket. Honestly, I didn't think we looked that wrecked, but my parents' faces changed my mind on that pretty fast
The next day, I had an x-ray which proved two things:
1. I had a fractured elbow
2. I was bad ass (in my own mind)
And that's the story of the scar on my right elbow.
I hope it never, never disappears.
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