Sledding is the root of all the world's problems. Forget crime, hunger, and violence. I have determined that sledding is the devil. I had never been sledding before coming to Dartmouth. In fact, I had never been sledding before this weekend. I am now half an inch shorter than I was upon matriculation. Sledding is directly responsible for this. I cannot believe that children are sent shooting down mountains unstrapped to anything, sitting on what amounts to garbage can lids, by their "loving" parents. Who thought of this activity?
You're probably wondering how I equate being half an inch shorter to sledding and not some freak disaster. (You're not? You heartless schmuck!) I went sledding this weekend on Freshmen Hill. Let me qualify that. I, along with approximately three hundred and fifty-two other people, four of whom were my friends, went sledding on Freshmen Hill. It was my idea. We had one of those two-person red plastic rectangular sleds. It looked a bit dubious, but I saw all of those four-year-olds blindly skidding down, so I thought all was well. I sledded down once and it was like being in the front seat of a roller-coaster with no safety checks or seatbelts. We hit a bump, we flew up, we flew down. My partner fell out of the sled and I slid down the rest of the way alone, calmly proclaiming "AAAAAIIIIIIIIIEE-EEEEEEAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIEIEIEIEIEIEI." When we reached the bottom, someone commented on our fantastic aerials.
Hmm, I thought, that didn't seem too safe --but these people have done this their whole lives and they're fine. (Brain damage, apparently, is not a visible disorder.) So we trekked up and decided to go down again. I once again got in the front of the fated sled and off we went. Once again, "AAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIII-EEEEEEEAAAAAAIIIIIIIEE --" THUMP. We hit a bump, we went about six feet in the air, and we came down. Rather, I plummeted down, the sled plummeted down under me, and my partner gracefully thumped into the soft snow. I cracked the sled down the middle. I was screaming "AAAAAAIIIIIIIIIEEEEEE-AAAAAIIIIIEEEEE" and everyone was staring at me. Soon I had a crowd of ten looking down on me. I assured them I wasn't paralyzed and told everyone that I just wanted to stay in the snow, lying down, for a few hours. They wouldn't let me get up. Someone called an ambulance. Flashing red lights, the gleaming chrome bumper: yep, the fire department had arrived. A burly paramedic came over and I asked if he could drive me to my dorm room. But that paramedic was crafty. He told me I could go home if I could sit up without pain. He began to help me up. I made it approximately three point five centimeters off of the ground before saying "Okay. Take me to the hospital."
Suddenly there were four paramedics and a backboard surrounding me and I was strapped in and carted off. As they were carrying me by the families, I saw mothers gathering their children and going home. I shouted "Don't let this happen to you! Sleds are the devil!" Hmm. Maybe that's why they were gathering their children. So the paramedics stuck me in the ambulance and drove me to DHMC. Inside a nurse unstrapped me but told me to stay on the backboard. She checked everything except my back and I wanted to shout "It's my back it's my back it's my back. LEAVE MY EPIGLOTTIS OUT OF THIS." Then she left. Finally, the doctor came and ordered x-rays. Another nurse came to wheel me to the x-ray room and we had the following conversation:
NURSE: "From Miami, are ya?"
PERSON IN IMMENSE PAIN: "Yep."
NURSE: "Are you here on vacation?"
P.I.I.P.: "No. I'm here for school."
NURSE: "Oh, where do you go to school?"
I did not answer.
Two hours after my x-rays were taken, the doctor returned to tell me that I had a compression fracture in one of my vertebrae and that it had squished itself to half of its original, statuesque, one-inch height. That is why I'm now permanently half an inch shorter than when I came to this frostbitten place. That half an inch was a good solid year of growth. And she added, I suppose to make me feel better, that "we usually see this sort of fracture in 80-year-old women." She gave me codeine and let me keep my hospital pants.
This sledding business has got to stop. I will not stand (lay?) by and let others suffer what I'm going through. As my grandmother says, "I have been lying here all day like a lox. You know, on a bagel." I cannot bend, shift, turn, or cough without pain or assistance. I am wearing hospital pants and no-skid socks. I feel like a cat just coming out of surgery--all of my friends have stopped by and brought me food, and they tap me on the head and tell me what a good egg I am. I need to be shipped home to Miami Beach to stay at the Jewish Home for the Agd (two syllables in agd) with all of the other 80-year-old women suffering from a compressed fracture of their first lumbar disc.
