BoomerGirl Diary

... If you have a tendency to trip and fall

This is another helpful missive on what to not do before you die. I won't weigh you down with the guilt of what you should do. Oh, no. I make it easy by telling you what to avoid.

The desert is a harsh and unforgiving place. If we fall up here in the Pacific Northwest while taking a hike, we have a better-than-average chance that we'll fall on something soft: Moss. Mud. Ferns. Not so in the desert, which is just a large sheet of sandpaper sprouting cactus.

I'd like to say that I was fleeing from a cougar or that I slipped while rock climbing on the fantastic formations while at Joshua Tree in Southern California a few years back, but I can't. As is typical of me, I fell for no particular reason. One minute I was striding downhill on a trail that consisted of a rock base covered with small, glass-like pebbles, and the next minute I was riding my right lower leg like a boogie board down that trail. Blood gushed from my knee when my husband helped me up, and the flesh from there to my ankle was pulped. I tied a sock around the worst part of it to stem the bleeding, and we hiked out.

We were, of course, totally unprepared. We'd consumed the last of our water and we had no first-aid kit. I hobbled to the car and we headed to the nearest park entrance, certain that there would be a first-aid kit there and some friendly park ranger who knew how to use it. Wrong. They gave us directions to the nearest hospital a dozen miles away.

The emergency room there was so busy that the best that they could do was give me some undiluted hydrogen peroxide and point to the restroom, where I stood on my undamaged leg, hefted the other one up into the sink, and poured.

The hydrogen peroxide fizzed, bubbled, dripped and oozed as I poured it on my wound.

So did my eyes.

Another half-hour drive and we were at the Palm Springs Hospital emergency room where small children who were waiting for their parents to pass kidney stones stood, awed and silent, in little groups before me, eyeing what was obviously the most fantastic owie they'd ever seen.

I spent the rest of my vacation sitting in the sun next to a pool and a hot tub that we had paid extra to heat but that I couldn't use. Even three years after the fall, when I reveal the still raw-looking scar to people, they go “EEEeeewww!” and “Don't show me that again!”

Especially the people that I don't know.