Elevator to the Basement (Tragedy turned Comic)

Elevator to the Basement

I was waiting for the elevator to return me from the orthopedics ward on the third floor back to the clinic garage. Two women, I presume a mother and a twenty-something daughter, came up to wait as well. I smiled at the pair and turned back to wait expectantly for the “BING!” and the blinking green light indicating the arrival of the errant elevator.
“Oh, my gosh!” Are you all right?” exclaimed the daughter. Turning back I saw that both she and her mother were staring, mouths somewhat agape, at the plastic tubing emerging from my left foot cast and climbing determinedly and heroically up to a 6” x 8” box encased in black canvas, slapping my mid-section, and dangling from a strap around my neck. This “boom box” was making a belching, sucking sound.
I steadied myself on my crutches and looked down at the box and the tubing extending down to my cast-encrusted left calf. “Well, look at that!” I exclaimed in wondered amazement, as if a particularly cute puppy had bounced into our scene and sat at my foot awaiting a pat or a thrown ball.
The box had a flashing red LED and a digital display window showing things like the time and my internal weather. It was making a resonating deep-based toad-like belch with the regularity of the second hand of a clock and occasionally giving a slushy slurping sound as if the toad had just captured and sucked up a particularly juicy, blood- engorged fly. The eight feet of curling tubing was filled with bright fluid the color of blood. It was, in fact, my blood, and with every slurping suck of the toad-burping black box a length of the fluid went up from my leg and disappeared into the bowels of the box.
I smiled at the two women, acknowledging their justified amazement at the sight. “Oh, I’m just fine! I had surgery on my left heel a while back and the wound isn’t healing so the doctor had to cut out all the dead flesh. It’s a really fascinating looking open-wound about 3” x 4”. Artistic really. My daughter thinks it looks like the face of that giant red dog in the children’s story. Clifford, I think. My mother was there at the time; she got up to take a look after the doctor had gone to wash up. He’d had to stop when he’d cut away all my flesh and hit the bare metal of the plate – you know the one holding my foot together with the six screws. Didn’t hit that 6” oblong screw. Well, you can imagine it was a long, boring affair. The doctor, a swell guy, had offered to give me drugs and do it in the O.R., but that seemed like a lot of trouble. My left foot and that horse Barbaro: we’re pals. Fell about the same time. Almost exactly the same hardware. She, my mother that is, didn’t say anything. She looked kind of peaked afterwards. Kind of like you both do now. I bet you two have had a hard afternoon.”
The women looked at me and then at each other. Then they looked at the other elevator. It was still down on the ‘B’ level of the clinic garage.
“This black leech sucker is supposed to help make the wound help by pulling off all the precious bodily draining fluids. I have to come here three times a week to have the dressing changed os the wound doesn’t get any more bacterially infected. My doctor is really nice about it – especially because his wife just had a baby a few months ago – around the the time of my accident.”
The women glanced again at the elevator status and, it seemed to me, to look for the stairway exit signs. Always a wise precaution I thought.
“I fell out of tree you know – well, actually, off a ten foot ladder – onto the concrete sidewalk.”
The elevator “BINGED!”, the doors opens and we all got on, me swinging along with my crutches and the ten pound toad box around my neck.
“Level A, please,” I said.
“We’re on Level B,” said the mother.
“You know that sticker they have on the top step of ladders?” I asked. “The one that says THIS IS NOT A STEP? It turns out that’s really good advice” I said.
The two women nodded knowingly and quietly to each other.
“The first time I came to this clinic three days after the emergency room visit the nurse, Bonnie is her name which is kind of funny because she was raised in China, came running in and said to me ‘You were cleaning the gutters, weren’t you!’. ‘No, really!’ I told her. ‘It was a tree – I was pruning a tree.’ ‘Winter, it’s skiing. Spring, it’s gutters.’ She continued. I told her ‘Well, in my case, I was pruning a tree – the vines off the tree. They didn’t hold when I fell of the ladder. The CAT scan guy in the E.R. said I was really lucky by grabbing hold of the vines the way I did. Probably straightened out my fall; slowed it down. He still scanned my back and my head anyway. What a pain! I told him I wished I hadn’t done such a good job on clearing away the vines. It’s a lesson I told him. You ladies must have been through such crap today.”
The elevator had been “BING!”ing ways all the time. “2 – BING! 1 – BING! Garage Level A – BING!” The doors slowly opened. I swung out while the ladies held the door for me.
“Thanks!” I said. “If I’m luck, I won’t get gangrene and have to my foot amputated. Well, good-bye!” I said cheerily. “Have a nice day!” Weren’t they wonderful given the awful day they must have had I thought.
The ladies smiled and waved. Just as the elevator doors were closing in front of them I heard “ Do you suppose she’s on drugs?” and “I sure hope so.”