I remember once we loaded our blue plastic sleds in the car and went driving north in search of hills. Usually, when my father was at work and school was cancelled, my mother would bring us to Swan Street Park-- a five minute walk from our house. It must have been a weekend day when we piled into the car. After hours of driving, we found a hill and pulled to the side of the road. It was freezing, the wind stung my face and I remember standing at the top and not wanting to go down. My father sat in the sled behind me and pushed us down the hill, I was afraid of going fast, so he put his foot out to slow us down and inadvertently kicked up the snow with his work boot. The snow flew up and directly into my face the whole way down. As soon as we made it to the top of the hill I buried my face in my mother's stomach crying hot tears down my stinging cheeks. My father felt terrible and pulled out his "hanky" to wipe down my soaked face. The snow had gone up his pants on the ride down. We were both soaked and freezing. I don't remember if we stayed after that single trip down the hill, but I remember the wet, cold car ride home seemed to take forever. It might have been the last time I ever went sledding.
Years later, my husband called me excitedly around Christmas time to ask if he could buy us sleds. He didn't get excited about much, so of course I said yes. That winter we got more snow than I ever remember seeing in my life. Another foot seemed to fall every three to five days. The piles in the lawn beside my driveway towered over my head and I had to catapult the snow up and over the bank. We thought of the sleds. He said he wanted to go to a place in Billerica-- several cities and a highway away. He had gone to a place there, maybe a church parking lot, when he was in middle school. He couldn't remember exactly where it was, or what it was called. The only other time we'd gone to Billerica together was on a beautiful summer day and we'd gotten lost. I wasn't about to take my car out in a blizzard to go searching for a place that probably only existed in memory.
The snow continued to fall that winter and snow days from work racked up. One weekday, when we were both off, we went to go dig out his mother's car. We decided to stop home to eat and then try to finally take the sleds out. I pulled into the driveway and got out, holding the car door to steady myself on the slippery pavement. As I was shutting the door, my husband snuck up behind me and made a noise to startle me. It was enough to jolt me into momentary hesitation. My entire body froze for just an instant, but it was long enough for the car door to swing shut. My index finger was still in the door, but I pulled away instinctively. I remember my eyes filled up with tears before I felt the pain or realized what had happened. I swore at my husband, told him he'd made me shut my finger in the door, and walked toward the house, cupping my hand. "Are you alright?" he asked. "Don't you see the blood trail in the snow?" I answered.
Once when I was in Georgia, the doctor told me I needed to have a tetanus shot. The nurse pulled out a small bottle and asked me if I could read the series of letters and numbers on the label to her. "Yup, that's the one," she said after I'd read them off. Growing up I had to have blood drawn at least every six months, if not more often. As a child I would cry, kick, scream, and fight to avoid the pin prick. My father would have to take the day off from work so that he could physically restrain me, locking my legs in his, strapping my arm down to the table with his massive hands. When I was seven and hospitalized I had to have daily blood tests in a addition to a permanent IV in my right arm. I was in too much pain and too weak to fight. With practice, you can grow accustomed to anything. After two weeks in the hospital, having bi-yearly blood tests seemed insignificant. From then on I would roll up my sleeve and sit stoically in the chair, smiling as every nurse commented on what prominent veins I had. A few years before the tetanus shot in Georgia I had contracted blood poisoning and gone an entire day without having it treated. My foot ballooned up four times its size and a red line had formed up my shin. The doctors immediately stabbed me with a tetanus shot directly in the bony top of my foot. The shot to the arm in Georgia was nothing compared to the needle to the foot, so I sat unfazed.
Just after the nurse removed the needle from my arm, she said I would have to wait a few minutes to make sure I wasn't having an allergic reaction. She said to tell her if I felt dizzy, nauseous, or anything out of the ordinary. "I feel dizzy right now," I said, wondering why I was suddenly breathing heavy and losing my vision. "It wouldn't happen that fast. You're fine," she said. "Something's wrong," I managed to slur. She put a blood pressure cuff on my arm and seconds later said, "You wasn't lyin'." She had me sit with my head between my legs and instructed my husband to get a wet paper towel from the bathroom. The feeling passed after a few minutes. She explained that nearly passing out was called vasovagal, a natural reaction to trauma (even minor) that you could develop at any point in life. She laughed as she described my husband's face and urgency. "I thought he was going to have a heart attack," she chuckled. Later, he told me he thought she'd given me the wrong vial and was prepared to raise hell if something serious happened.
After spending most of my life watching surgeries on TV, watching my mother treat my brother's injuries, and being stuck with needles at each visit to the doctor, in my twenties I began to experience vasovagal every time I had blood drawn. After some observation, I learned that it was usually brought on by lack of trust and if I felt comfortable with the person who was administering the test I could over come the feeling. It was a small victory when a few weeks ago I had a breast biopsy, fully awake, without any medication, and didn't feel like passing out.
After shutting my finger in the car door, I stumbled into the house and grabbed a wad of paper towels and an ice cube to stop the bleeding. I felt the heart-pounding dizziness coming on and sprawled across my bed to avoid passing out. After a few moments of steadying my breath and regaining control I unwrapped the towels and found that I had a deep gash on the tip of my index finger. I think at that point my husband thought I'd lost a finger, and he was relieved to see me still in one piece. I'm anemic so even a paper cut takes days to heal. It took hours of holding wrapped ice cubes around my finger to slow the bleeding. My husband pulled out his army field dressing kit and wrapped my finger in inches of gauze and tape.
We went to work the following day since the snow had melted enough to make the roads passable. I was afraid to take off the gauze in case I had another attack of vasovagal so I went to work looking like a cartoon character who had just smashed her thumb on a hammer. My students and coworkers laughed at the ridiculous dressing and imagined the injury to be much worse than it was.
Even though it snowed several more times that year, we never took the sleds out. That was the last winter we made any attempt to do fun things together, so the sleds stayed under our bed, collecting dust. My index finger has a small white scar that I find myself tracing with my thumb at times. For a while I was ashamed of the many marks I have on my body. I wrote a quote down from the book that I was reading when my husband told me he was leaving. I remind myself of it when I think of the emotional and physical scars that I bear: "A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means I survived" (From Little Bee by Chris Cleave).
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