by Jaime Welch

Created on: July 27, 2009

Alone in a Taiwanese Hospital

It hurts more now, I grunted as I reached towards my broken tibia. The nurse giggled, and as I looked into her eyes I knew she was giggling out of nervousness. She had no idea what I was saying. I searched my limited Taiwanese or Chinese vocabulary for an appropriate word, then decided screeching OW, was probably the most affective.

Only I said nothing because I didn't want to lose control. My only company was my brave self, the practical voice in my head that had often served me well during my twenty-eight years of rash behavior. I knew this calm, wise voice had taken over as a means of survival, having conquered the physical condition of shock and mental condition of denial that had mislead me into thinking I could drive 20 minutes home on a mangled moped after I had collided with another moped on the streets of FongShan, Taiwan. As time passed, as the reality of where I was and what I had done to myself set in, I knew I would be vulnerable to another voice. The voice of my accuser was waiting, that whining pitiful voice that would ask rhetorical useless questions that were not concerned with dealing with the present situation, only with finding someone to blame. If given permission to speak, in the end that scathing voice, dripping with disgust, would point its crooked finger at me, as it always did, then disappear, leaving me without even myself for comfort.

So I said nothing, maintaining the stoic mask that felt strange on my normally expressive face. I had been at the Chang Gung Memorial Hospital for several hours now since my accident awaiting a four hour surgery that I didn't know much about because no one could explain to me what was wrong or what they planned to do to fix it. I had seen the xray, and the top of tibia was jagged where it should have been smooth. The xray technician called it a mini-fracture. (But, he also looked worried, didn't know if I'd need an operation, and commented on my bravery.) Three months on crutches, one month of no work. This is about all I knew, except that the operation was necessary, not really an option, although they did need my permission. To make this decision on so little information and without many trusty sounding boards had been difficult. A couple of my Taiwanese co-workers/friends had been there in the beginning, fluttering around me, filling out all the paperwork that was in Chinese, answering or translating as best as they could the endless forms and my endless

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