X-rays at the End of Days

“I hobbled out of the hospital and thought that the past three hours of waiting, hobbling, X-raying and waiting again to find out if my ankle was fractured would probably make a decent read.”

BY: TREVON SMITH

By: Trevon Smith // THE UNDERGROUND

Doctor Khadim asked me what happened and I lied. Or, not really lied but just left out a lot of details in my answer, which was funny because this was maybe the third time I’d half-told the story about my injury. 

The first time was the Saturday morning after it happened on a phone call with my coworker. I was supposed to relieve him at 11AM, which was three hours away, but it turns out ice, Tylenol and eight hours of sleep don’t cure sprained ankles overnight. So I call and tell him that I hurt it when I was walking down the stairs at home and missed a step and caught myself awkwardly with my other foot which wasn’t entirely untrue, and he says he’s sorry to hear that and that I should call our supervisor to get someone else to come in. I called the supervisor and he told me that it put the company in a tough spot to get my shift covered two and a half hours before I’m scheduled to come in, and I wanted to tell him that it was an even tougher spot to have to hobble to the shower then to the bus stop and down the stairs at Kennedy Station, up the stairs again at St. George, then up a couple more at Osgoode just to get to work.

But I didn’t tell him that. Instead I said “I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” which was true. Definitely true. 

The second time I told the half-story was when my dad called me on Sunday, reminding me about Mother’s Day, which I forgot about, but also to catch up as we usually did on a semi-weekly basis. He asked why I wasn’t at work and I told him I hurt my ankle while I was out shooting photos, which was a bit closer to the full truth, I guess, but I didn’t want to bore him with details. So we caught each other up on our lives thus far then the call ended with mumbled goodbyes, and I called my mom right after and wished her a happy Mother's Day, as if I didn’t forget, and she told me we’re going to the hospital for X-rays in the afternoon. 

Afternoon rolled around and we were both in the car, Mom and I, with our masks and gloves and Lysol wipes, barreling down the empty Morningside hill then up again on an even emptier Ellesmere hill to Centenary Hospital, and passed their Covid-19 assessment centre to finally arrive at the emergency centre tucked right behind it as if to say if you aren’t here for a Covid-19 assessment, it’s probably not an emergency. 

Mom let me out, I hobbled to the automatic doors and was told by the muffle-masked security guard to toss my gloves in the bin, which I did, and was then asked mandatory questions about if I’d been in contact with anyone who had a confirmed case of Covid-19 and if I travelled outside of the country or province recently and if I had experienced any coughing or sneezing or respiratory issues or muscle aches or whatever other new symptoms Covid-19 had presented because it seemed like everyday the virus was revealing something new to the health officials like a toddler that goes on and on and on to their parents about some new thing they learned in school that day and the parents just nod and say mhm, that’s sweet dear. 

So I said no to all of the above because that’s the truth and the security gave me a green sticker and told me to “please proceed.”

I hobbled in and talked to the triage nurse, who took my health card and blood pressure and found nothing wrong with either, and he directed me to the registration nurse who asked “have you been here before?” and I struggle to answer because I’ve definitely hurt my ankle before, which was in high school after a bad fall when I longboarded down a small patch of pavement at one of the elementary schools in Guildwood, but I definitely remember telling my friends, the ones who didn’t witness the injury anyway, that I hurt it going down a massive hill that varied in size each time I told the story. 

It was definitely more than a small injury at the time because that doctor, who worked at Scarborough General so I’ll have to tell the registration nurse that I was at a different hospital before, told me “it was the worst ankle break he’d ever seen.”

So the registration nurse got me registered and told me to wait, and I waited for roughly fifteen minutes before they called me and directed me to Doctor Khadim, who asked how I hurt my ankle, not the one I broke in high school, and I tell him a generally true truth that I had a bad fall. 

Doctor Khadim gives me a yellow sheet and directs to get X-rays done and that I should follow the purple dots on the ground until I get there and that when I’m done, I should follow the yellow dots back to the emergency centre and tell them I had the X-rays and to follow the yellow dots again to another waiting area, all on a sprained or possibly fractured ankle, but definitely not broken because, as I said, I’ve had a broken ankle before and this injury doesn’t hurt as much as that evening in Guildwood. 

So I hobble and hobble and occasionally look down to make sure I’m following the purple dots and not the burgundy ones which looked similar, at least in my periphery anyway. I get to an empty waiting area near the X-ray centre and am greeted by an X-ray technician in what looked like a CDC-approved hazmat suit and she takes my yellow sheet and guides me to the lab and asks me to sit on the table and take my footwear off, which I do, and she asks me to lay down half on my side with my right leg slightly bent but sticking mostly straight and to have my sprained or possibly fractured foot pointing directly out with the ball of my ankle pointing straight up, which all comes out feeling like I’m doing some pseudo-yoga. 

Two quick snaps, a bit like my ankles, and she tells me to follow the yellow dots back down the empty hallways, so I hobble away.

I get back to the emergency centre and follow the yellow dots, as Doctor Khadim instructed, to another waiting area which is solely occupied by a father with his toddler daughter in his lap who was herself occupied by the nursery rhymes on his phone because I could make out what sounded like “London Bridge is Falling Down” and “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” There was a TV in the waiting area set to CP24 and one the headings in their feed read that, for the first time, new confirmed cases of Covid-19 were below three hundred that day in Ontario, which in my opinion was a weirdly positive angle for such grim news. 

I was soon guided to a final checkup area, room C, where I waited and waited and watched the nurses go back and forth and one of the nurses was talking about their student loans with another and the first one went on about how it costs too much to live in the city and how they were paying $2000 a month for their student loan and the other nurse said that they should go back to school to get a break from OSAP payments, but then the second nurse followed up by saying it would be difficult during the lockdown to even go about school. 

Another patient entered room B beside me which was separated by a curtain and he talked to Doctor Khadim about his own ankle injury and how he never had problems before and that he hadn’t put much stress on it since he was working from home nowadays, and he had been playing with his kids in his yard and something just gave. Doctor Khadim told him curtly that excessive sitting can also be bad for our ankles and that he, the other patient, should go get X-rays done and the Doctor gave him what I assumed to be a yellow sheet because I didn’t see it through the curtain, and I assume the other patient followed the purple dots down the lonely hallway to the empty X-ray waiting area and he would also be meant to do some weird pseudo-yoga with his leg bent slightly and his toes jutting sideways with the ball of his ankle pointing to the ceiling. 

Doctor Khadim then entered my curtained room and told me I was free to go and that it was “just a bad sprain,” which was funny to me because here I am for a super minor injury while one father sits his daughter on his lap and lulls her calm with nursery rhymes from his phone and another father hobbles away to get X-rays done so he can play in his yard with his own kids, while the news happily reports that, for a virus that’s killed over five thousand in Canada alone, today was the first time less than three hundred new cases had been found by health officials. 

So I thanked Doctor Khadim for his time and hobbled home.