Follow-up to the crash since I never posted any:

While we were sitting in the health center, Mike pointed out that there was a piece of my glasses missing: the hinge. We figured it was still sitting in front of the parking garage, where I crashed. Well, a doctor took me back and did what she could to clean it up, but she couldn't tell if I needed stitches. I don't know if I told her that a part of my vision on the left side was faded. I don't know if either of us noticed how dazed I was. Shock, I guess. Lucky for me, it didn't hurt that much. I guess I had a headache from the impact, but the actual torn flesh got smacked or scraped or squished so much, it was numb.

But I had an appointment to go to, and I was going to do anything I needed to to get there. Right. I missed it. And the two classes after it. When I resigned to not making the appointment with my professor, I asked Mike to go tell her. (Turns out, I was heading to visit the wrong professor, but in the end, it didn't matter.) I also asked him to take the paper that was due that day, but he didn't. Looking back, now that I've heard his assessment of that day, I must conclude that he was more worried than I was and his information overload didn't allow for my research paper to take priority like it did in my brain. All well. My professors understood it as an emergency and let me off the hook. (I still wanted to turn it in. I'm probably the kind of person you want on a mission to save the world. I'll be bleeding and beaten half out of my mind and still try to get everything right.)

Everyone left for a while for some reason or another, and they wouldn't let me leave. The health professional had me all bandaged up, but she was waiting for the real doctor to get back from lunch. So I lay there, trying not to stress. I knew it was all my fault. I remembered thinking that the bike might not go over the curb. I remembered that I should have worn a helmet after the first crash of the year. (But by golly, I wanted to see my alarm clock from my bed, and I had no other way to keep it up that high!) I knew my parents were going to freak. I knew it never had to happen. My stupidity had given me a big bloody gash, broken glasses (how was I going to tell Mom?), a very important missed appointment, and two skipped classes--my most important ones of the day. Or maybe I didn't have to miss them. How long did I have to finish there? Maybe I'd miss the mandatory humanities class, but I still had time to make my 3:00 fiction writing class. If only I didn't need stitches. I didn't think I could do stitches. The thought of a needle going in an out of my skin, sewing it together like the holes in my camo skirt, terrified me. The pain that had to cause! I couldn't take pain. I couldn't deal with it. Please, God, I thought over and over, anything but stitches. Anything but stitches! Finally, to at least try to hold myself together, to push away the regret for later, to push away the worries until I could do something, I sat up, waited for the room to stabilize, tottered to my feet, and got my Bean (media device) from wherever I kept it then. I played the uplifting Christian music I rely on so heavily and lay back on the bed, only this time, the music emphasized everything that had gone wrong. I cried. Eventually, I tried to stop. Just listen. Wait and listen.

The doctor came in after a while, and I resumed my brave face. Jokes to break the tension. Act pleasant above all else. I don't think she fell for it, but she at least pretended to. My shaking voice and hands might have given me away. She told me I needed stitches and that she was going to call Campus Security to take me to the emergency room, which I was thankful for, since I hadn't a clue where it was, though it couldn't have been more than two blocks away. I might could have walked... Anyway, she suggested I have a friend meet me, and I called Mike to ask if he would go with me, if he minded the chance of missing his afternoon class. He said he didn't. I still didn't like asking him to.

The doctor was kind. She gave me a bag of something, I think. Maybe she put my bloodied gym shirt in a paper bag. I don't remember. She gave me ice, though it melted long before I saw another doctor. I don't remember when Mike got there. It had to have been at least five minutes from when I called; I know he was on Northside, but he biked back as fast as he could. Whenever he got there, neither the doctor nor he would let me carry my own backpack, though I would have if they'd let me. It couldn't have been that heavy.

The doctor sent me down in the elevator, and Mike and I waited at the bottom for campus security. (Come to think of it, I don't know why we had to wait. Their office is one floor below where we were waiting, as I found out when Idaho made me lose my phone later on.) Mike didn't say much, so I tried to keep talking. Anything to keep my mind off my parents and my stupidity. I had to have a decent story to tell people. How could I deal with admitting that I'd crashed my bike while not wearing a helmet? "Klingons," I told Mike. "I got attacked by Klingons, and I won." We bantered like that for a while... kinda. He was distracted or something. I wonder why. We laughed at my coat, which had about a dollar coin-sized hole in the shoulder, spewing little puffs of white feathers into the air.

Eventually, the campus security SUV arrived, and we climbed into the back. The officer was really nice, too, and he and Mike talked the whole way. We took a spiraling path from there to the emergency room. I don't think it was much farther than two hundred meters in displacement, but we had to go around the edges of the block to get there. The weird hospital has the emergency room embedded in the very center of the entire complex. The officer snarled something sarcastic about a car blocking the drop-off zone and Ohio drivers' ineptitude. We got in all right in the end, glad for having met him.

I don't really remember much about waiting. I filled out some forms, described my pain as about a four. Mike admonished me for that. He said I would have gotten attention faster with more pain, but I answered that I was stable for now and had no reason not to wait when others might need the attention before I did. The hospital couldn't have been that stupid. Surely, they took into account both that I had a bleeding head wound and that someone had already tended it for the moment. I was pretty calm by then, starting to regain my senses, and we talked pretty much the whole time, the only people laughing in the emergency room waiting area. I'd have been sick with anxiety if he hadn't been there, and I knew it. He might have been instead of me, though. I never knew.

About 5:30, they called me back to see a doctor. After some preliminary cleaning, she looked at it and said, "You have a piece of metal in there."

"Really?" Mike and I looked at each other, information clicking into place. "So that's what happened to the hinge."

Sure enough, she pulled the hinge of my glasses out from my eyebrow. Now, remember: the first health professional, the health center doctor, and I had all looked at it, trying to determine how deep it was. I don't think any of us suspected it could hide an entire hinge. Well, we mused over it, and then she threw it out! I moaned about it, sure we could have fixed my glasses with that one part.

Six stitches in the end. They weren't as bad as I expected, though they might have been if things hadn't played out as they had. Mike held my hand. The doctor talked to one of us, probably Mike. I don't remember. They talked about skiing, about school, our majors, how we met. She commented on how nice he was to come with me. I agreed.

He walked me back to Leutner for dinner. I wasn't as dizzy as I had been, but it was still a long walk. The cold wind felt especially sharp against the new wound, even if it was covered with a band-aid.

Somewhere in the middle of it all or shortly after. Maybe that night. I don't know. At some point, it struck me that God had been with me through it all. I don't know why it happened, but I do know that it could have been hundreds of times worse. If Mike hadn't been there, I would not have staunched the bleeding. If I hadn't had racquetball that morning, I wouldn't have had expendable clothes with which to staunch, contaminated by the locker room floor, though they were. If it hadn't been cold that morning, I wouldn't have worn my big, puffy winter coat, and the hole in the coat would have been in my better clothes or in my shoulder. Had I not gotten stitches, no one would have found the hinge in my face. Had Mike not accompanied me, I would have freaked out in the emergency room worse than I did in the health center. And missing class turned out to be okay... just this once.