Chapter 2: Santa Maria

Eirik and Big Eyes each took an arm and helped me hop my way to a taxi outside the station. In the pain and rush, it wasn’t until Smiley and I were already in the car that we realized not everyone could go together. So Big Eyes jumped in, leaving Eirik and Sashay to follow separately. Off we sped to the nearest hospital. I cradled my leg in the air, trying to hold the pieces together in all manners of the phrase. When we arrived at the hospital, the driver kindly went inside and procured a wheelchair for me. An awkward pause marked the poignant parent-child moment when Big Eyes was faced for the first time with taking responsibility for me, and for the first time, I was reliant on him. I heard the rip of velcro on my 15-year-old’s wallet as he paid for the ride. And Big Eyes, Smiley and I made our way into the emergency room of the largest public hospital in Portugal: Hospital Santa Maria.

The small waiting room was packed. We were directed to take a number. The reception desk waved me away and summoned Isak to handle the administrative procedures. Smiley and I looked around the very institutional room. There was a person in every seat; they all looked to have been there a while; and hardly anyone was occupying themselves with a smart phone. I was certainly not the only person in Lisbon needing urgent medical attention. I may have hyperventilated a little more at the realization that this might be a long and excruciating wait. I feebly asked Smiley what our number was and what number they were currently on, and he either had no idea what I meant, or he answered me and I could not grasp the response.

For anyone there who was bored, we proceeded to offer distraction. A heavily breathing, middle-aged, foreign woman sitting in a wheelchair in the middle of the crowded waiting room rocking to and fro in a frantic effort to stem the pain, her contorted leg held high in the air by her rapidly failing arms. A bewildered, misleadingly mature-looking teenager running to and fro from desk to mother, trying to scrape together addresses, phone numbers and answers to obscure bureaucratic questions. A darling, masked, redheaded boy standing at his mama’s side with frozen fear in his eyes, trying to be brave but then suddenly puking uncontrollably, his mask overflowing with half-digested lunch before he moved to become one with the speckled tile of the well-trafficked hospital entryway. The mother looking on helplessly, trying to reassure, hoping desperately to keep him off the floor, unable to disengage her arms from her leg. Luckily Smiley has grown up all over the world knowing that everyone around him is a possible helper. The Portuguese emergency room patients did not disappoint.

Someone must have taken pity on our sorry sight because we were soon invited inside the emergency consultation area. One nurse administered to Smiley, while another assessed my condition in an adjacent stall. Big Eyes and Smiley were then ordered back to the waiting room as the nurses wheeled me off to wait for radiology. Nothing else happened quickly. The hospital was totally overwhelmed with patients, partly because of the Covid pandemic, but also, I later learned, because of renovations that had reduced capacity overall and had also shut down 25 of the institution’s usual 45 beds. Eventually I had x-rays, and some hours later, a doctor informed me that I had indeed broken my tibia (shin bone). The doctor and his assistant slapped a wet, warm, heavy cast on the mess, said I would need surgery but there were no openings for at least a week, and put me out to pasture on a gurney in the ER hallway. Here began my stay in purgatory.