My Emergency Room Experience

When I was in my 20's, I had a bad bicycle accident where my bike lodged into some trolley tracks and I was thrown from the bike, landing face first on a steel grating. My hands helped to soften my fall, but my face (along with my left hand, where apparently I hit the pavement first) was badly cut and I had a broken wrist and a broken jaw.

I lost consciousness and I have no memory of the accident itself but I remember coming to in the emergency room and with doctors working on my face. They told me I was getting stitches and I asked one doctor how my face would look and instead of answering he said, "Why? Are you a model?"

I still sometimes have a hard time believing this really happened, but it did - imagine the scenario, a young woman, badly broken from a terrible bike accident, disoriented, in terrible pain, and she asks the person who is supposed to be helping her a simple question and instead of getting a helpful response, she gets a snotty, sarcastic answer.

And on top of everything else, it turned out that this "doctor" was actually only a resident (officially a medical school graduate, but still doing his residency) and he did a TERRIBLE job on my face. I had to have FIVE reconstructive surgeries and I still have bad scars.

I have other stories to tell about other doctors involved with the various procedures during the emergency room visit and afterward, but this is by far the worst (emotionally, at least).

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