Fixing a Hole
Stitches and Paul McCartney at the ER
July 2012. As the extended July 4th weekend wound down, I was relaxing on the couch, reading New York Magazine’s cover story on why the rich are bigger jerks than the poor, when a call interrupted my quiet time. I fumbled the phone and missed the call. I saw that it was from my fifteen-year-old son who prefers to communicate via cryptic or incomplete texts. I called him right back only to get his phonemail. I tried again. This time Julian answered, “Hey dad. You have to come get me at the park. I got hurt.” I started asking for details, but he cut me off, “It’s an emergency. I’m to the right of the museum entrance. Hurry,” and he hung up.
I knew he meant the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I was out of the door in seconds. I speculated on the severity of his injury during my walk-run to the museum just a couple of blocks away, hoping he had a helpful soul tending to him. I ruled out head trauma. He seemed pretty coherent, settling on a worst-case scenario of a broken ankle given his devotion to parkour with its flying leaps over obstacles that he and his friends practice in the park.
In no time I was in front of the Met at Fifth Avenue and 82nd Street. I turned north while searching for him among the throng of tourists. I spotted him at a corner of the massive building about 100 feet away. He was standing shirtless facing the building, his t-shirt wrapped around the knee of the leg that he had propped up on the ledge of the wall. He spotted me, too, and I could tell from his body language that he was a little worried. When I reached him, he said nonchalantly, “I hurt my leg a bit,” trying to minimize the urgency, unveiling what he was covering with his bloodied t-shirt: a deep gash just below the left knee, an inverted triangle a couple of inches wide at the top. It appeared as if he had left a good-sized chunk of his leg on the wall he had run into. Briefly, I considered asking him to show me the wall in order to retrieve the piece of flesh that, surely, must be hanging there in case the doctors want to sew it back on. This hole in his leg was not something I could treat at home. I needed a cab to rush him to Lenox Hill Hospital, just a few blocks away.
Cabs are plentiful by the museum, and we got one right away, Julian limping to the curb. I told the driver to hurry to the emergency room on 77th Street. The driver looked over his shoulder, noticed the leg injury with much concern. At first I thought he was worried about getting blood on his cab, but he was genuinely concerned about Julian. While I was explaining over the phone the injury to mom, and dismissing her suggestion that I take him to Mount Sinai instead—another nearby hospital she prefers but farther away — I heard the cabbie, a Thai or Vietnamese man, say to Julian, “You okay, boy. We almost to hospital. Daddy take good care of you.”
The cabbie was quick. I thanked him as I paid the fare. We checked in at the ER. Julian was toughing it out in the waiting area, shirtless and in considerable pain. His name was called at about the same time mom arrived with a clean t-shirt and lots of concern. While the triage nurse was processing Julian, we agreed that I would stay with him since there wasn’t room for both parents to follow him around in the crowded emergency room. The real reason was the hole in his leg was tough to look at. Mom went back home to wait.
The emergency room doctor, after hearing the details about the impact, recommended an x-ray before treating the injury. He covered the gash with gauze and tape but left the drying blood that ran into his ankle-sock and sneaker. Julian hobbled over to the x-ray room waiting area. Soon after, he was called in, and the x-ray tech asked me to wait outside.
When the x-ray room door re-opened, Julian was in a wheelchair. “Why are you in a wheelchair?,” thinking that the x-ray technician must have seen something. “They hurt me in there,” he answered, smiling at the tech, who explained that he should have been wheeled in as well, and that he was fine.
We returned to the waiting area inside the ER. There was a golfer with a swollen wrist and forearm. He seemed in great shape for a septuagenarian. A doctor was telling him that she was going to place his forearm in a wrap. They had an exchange that ended with a tacit understanding that he was going to take off the wrap as soon as he left and he was going to continue playing golf. I tuned out the rest of their conversation till Julian—who kept listening—whispered, “He lives in Grampa’s building. I wonder if they know each other.”
“How can I draw blood when I am this loopy?”
Also waiting was the phlebotomist—as identified by his hospital ID card. He came to the ER because his back seized up while drawing blood from a patient. He was a young guy and we made friends. We had noticed him earlier, before Julian went to the x-ray room, in a lot of pain. His discomfort was now less pronounced. When Julian was given a painkiller, the phlebotomist told Julian that he was going to feel weird soon. He admitted he had taken two Percocets and, now, he was quite loopy. He kept repeating sentences that ended in loopy: “How can I draw blood when I’m this loopy?”
We chatted about his back problem. I gave him advice on how to improve his core muscles to prevent future flare-ups. Small talk. Our phlebotomist friend seemed like one of those souls always chased by dark clouds. Eventually, he was told he could go back to his post upstairs. He got up, and waved good-bye, wishing Julian good luck. As he walked away, he had a wet spot covering the entire butt of his scrubs from a leaking ice pack on his back. Julian and I shared a charitable smile.
Julian was called and brought to an examination table. The doctor told us that the x-ray was fine, that he would give him injections of local anesthesia, wait a few minutes for it to take effect, and then sew him up. Multiple times the doc came over, poked the hanging skin around the wound with the anesthesia needle, and left. It was clear the anesthesia had worked, but he didn’t start the sutures. Julian wondered how he would seal up the hole. I admitted that I didn’t know.
“I’m going to bring you my sweaters. You‘re better than grandma.”
Finally, the doc came back with a nurse who handed him packets with suture needles she claimed she had to retrieve from the O.R. Before starting, the doctor, a short man with a shuffling walk, stuck a needle into the wound one more time to see if the anesthesia was holding. It was. He proceeded to close the wound, stitching the triangular gap with a sickle-like needle. The triangle began to look like a smile under Julian’s knee. Five or six large stitches was all it took to close the wound nicely. It was now apparent that Julian hadn’t left a chunk of his shin at the wall, but rather, the hole was from the skin splitting apart forming a deep cut. Julian sat up admiring the stitching and quipped to the doc, “I’m going to bring you my sweaters. You’re better than grandma.”
The doc, a no-nonsense fellow, didn’t react. I jumped in, commenting that Julian is a joker, just in case the doctor took the quip the wrong way. He hadn’t. The doc asked Julian where he goes to school, but the doc acknowledged that he didn’t know that school. The doc then shared that he attended Bronx Science, repeating the line about how Bronx Science has more Nobel Laureates than Harvard. I told him I have a few friends who are alums, but none have won a Nobel Prize. Not yet.
The doc gave us some final instructions on how to care for the wound and told us to wait for the nurse who would clean up the mess he had made during the procedure. We waited a few minutes and a different nurse came to dress the wound and clean the dry blood. She was a redhead, well into her second trimester. She repeated the care instructions. After I mentioned that we were leaving for a beach vacation the next day, she stressed to Julian that avoiding an infection was more important than jumping in the ocean. She then went through additional instructions and more warnings. Thankfully, she handed me a few instruction sheets with the same details when she was finished. We were dismissed.
We headed back out into the triage waiting area and said good-bye to the security woman who had greeted us warmly when we first arrived. I told her Julian was going to survive. I decided to walk up Park Avenue, which is less crowded than Lexington. Julian concurred. His leg was numb enough to walk the short distance home, and with the Percocets, he was feeling loopy.
As we headed toward Park Avenue, I noticed a couple exiting the hospital entrance in front of us. The woman was wearing a red shirt and jeans. The man, a bit older, was in a dress shirt and gray trimmed running shorts. As we walked past them, the driver from a waiting black Escalade jumped out to help get the woman into the back seat behind the driver. The man in the shorts walked around the rear of the Escalade to get in on the street side. I signaled to Julian to cross the street in front of the parked Escalade because I thought I recognized the man. I wanted to get another look when he came around the back. I did get another quick look, and I told Julian that I thought that was Paul McCartney getting in the car. “The Beatle?” I nodded yes.
We continued toward Park Avenue, now on the north side of the street. As we got close to the intersection, the Escalade pulled up at the red light. Julian and I both turned to look at the vehicle to get another peek, but the windows were heavily tinted with no way to see in. Then, the rear window lowered and there was Paul sticking his head out giving us a left-handed thumbs-up sign. With a big smile, he said, “Hi fellows. I thought you had noticed.” I yelled out, “Yes, I thought that was you!” We quickly exchanged a couple of other words I can’t recall. The whole time Paul was smiling at us, nodding slightly. When the light changed, the Escalade pushed through the intersection leaving us behind in disbelief.
On our walk home we rehashed our encounter with a Beatle. I reminded Julian that Paul is one of two living Beatles left, to which he responded, “Good thing you didn’t call him Ringo.” When we got home, mom was anxiously waiting to hear about the knee, but we could only talk about our brief encounter with Paul, remembering something new with every retelling. I lamented I didn’t have the presence of mind to yell out, “This is a Julian, too,” thinking of “Hey Jude.”
Three weeks later, when he closed the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London singing a roaring “Hey Jude,” we all happily joined in on the coda while, of course, claiming Paul as our fast friend.
Three years later, I ran into Paul again. He was walking with a friend, exiting Central Park on the path by the Temple of Dendur, steps from where I had picked up Julian after his injury. I was walking in the other direction, with a perfect view of the wake he left behind. This time, Paul seemed much taller in skinny jeans and boots. I nodded subtly and discretely when we passed, like one does with an old acquaintance. Unfortunately, it was obvious he didn’t remember me.
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