Sunday, December 5 1999: Evening meeting at the stake centre. When I get back wide-eyed cousin Jamie tells me that Drew had just put her hand through the front window, and that Sharon and Jessica were rushing her off to the hospital. Not much info, and with not that much feeling I rush out to Payson. She’s not there. I rush back to Provo, continuing, consciously, to not think about it. When I get to Utah Valley I find that everyone is alright. There’s not too much of what I guess wasn’t too much blood anyway. Sharon seems to be rather enjoying her glimpse of the ER and its workings. Drew is just kind of languid. A doctor comes in to freeze the affected area. I look glancingly, and see what looks like a huge patch of exposed wrist guts. Drew cries quietly and bravely. Sharon goes back home and we wait for the plastic surgeon. Scathed tendon, they said. Hospitals have a built in tension reducer, which is that you have to wait for super long times. (This must apply mostly to the kind of mid-level emergencies that we’ve been restricted to.) Drew and I have a very nice chat. She keeps swinging that huge wrapped hand around very liberally.
When our plastic surgeon finally arrives, I wonder about the advisability of such swinging, and think again about the thin line between security and disaster. He opens up and looks in (forcing me to join him, and getting strangely gleeful when my colour flees and my head bobs up to the ceiling), then matter-of-factly delivers a rather dire report. Drew’s median nerve is half severed, meaning that not only sensation but mobility are at risk. This means the thumb, the index and middle fingers. Also (in other words?), the nerve delivering sensation to the palm is cut through. Some tendon or other is 90% sliced. Nerves south of the cut just die, and it’ll take months (1 mm per day) to recoup the three or four inches of affected space. If we recoup, that is.
These are worse cases, though, and we feel pretty much that things won’t be worse. Clichés come trotting—we’re constantly in fear for our children, but when the thing comes true you really do think of how much worse it could have been. And you take what you’ve got and move forward.