“Name?”
I repeat my name for the third time and despite the overall weakness of my body, I try to put some extra energy in my voice. The emergency room at the bottom station of the ski resort is extremely hot and I can feel droplets of sweat forming on my forehead. The doctor meticulously writes down my name on a paper and looks again at me with a heavy Farsi accent:
“Birth… year?”
I close my eyes for few seconds in hope that the pain goes away.
It does not.
I open them again and tell him my birth date. I lean against the bed to stabilize my body, while holding my left arm somehow away from my body. My legs are shaking and the nausea is kicking in big time.
“Insurance… in Iran?”
“Yes. Here you are.”
I give the doctor my insurance card and focus on taking shallow, yet steady breaths. The world swirls around me like an oversized carrousel. The last time I had the urge to vomit this hard was in the back-seat of a taxi after drinking one half of a vodka bottle with 4 Coronas in Singapore last month (and which I still consider as one of the best nights of my life).
I try to focus on the room and people around me. My eyes are craving for a firm point that would calm my consciousness down, but everything feels wobbly. The words of my friend are echoing in my head: “Michal, we should hurry up – you have maybe 7 minutes of a sanity window after which the pain starts to be unbearable”.
I look at my wristwatch. 13 minutes since the incident.
I am torn out of my own thoughts by another question.
“You, uhhh… city. Where?”
The pain is extreme. Every single millimeter of change in my body position, even breathing sends in tons of pain to my shoulder. Even breathing is difficult. I don’t have enough energy to keep my body straight so I just let my head bow slightly down and keep watching the floor. I see as two droplets of my sweat fall from my forehead on the tiles and I can’t stop the feeling that they create a huge ripple on the floor. All 32 tiles I can see are starting to get blurry. My voice is full of desperation, anger, and darkness:
“Doctor…”
“Yes?”
“Fix… my… f@$&*%g… shoulder…”
I look at the doctor. He looks back at me with heavily raised eyebrows. I realise the choice of words was poor.
Not because he is shocked. But because he didn’t understand a single word.
Once again I take a shallow breath to minimize the pain and repeat the same thing, but with much more desperation than before:
“Doctor…”
“Yes?”
“Please… help.”
The doctor looks at me, touches lightly my shoulder, thinks for a second, and says dryly:
“Help in hospital.”
“Wait, help not here?”
“No. You must hospital.”
My face loses the last hint of color when I imagine the long 3 hours of driving back through the curvy, destroyed mountain roads of northern Iran to the nearest hospital.
“Yeah, I have seen that yesterday! Couples sitting on a strip of grass between two roads, completely ignoring the cars passing along. Do you know what it is about?”
We are driving to one of the ski resorts in the north of Tehran and the discussion is lively – both my friend (Darya’s roommate) and her friend are living in this country for quite few years and the stories they managed to accumulate during this period is unbelievable. The current topic – dating practices in Tehran.
“Actually they are taking a picnic. It’s not the most romantic you’d ever imagine, yet it’s not that unusual. Now why in the middle of the street, I yet have to find that out, but I’m sure to tell you one day.”
The road cuts through mountains just few kilometer away from Tehran. We pass strange shapes, holes, canyons, forbidden villages. The world outside has its own, Iranishy tempo. The world inside of the car has the tempo of its own. We discuss how it feels to live in this country. My 1.5 days are nothing when compared to many years of experience my friends have accumulated here, yet at least I have a hunch of the feeling one gets while actually living here.
What I find quite interesting is the perception of segregation/distance between sexes. The hijab “culture” (I’ll go to hell for this expression) in Iran has a different flavor than what you can see in Saudi. After spending months in Saudi, I find it almost playful (my road to the hell of simplicism was definitely approved by this). The scarves are colorful, they cover only part of the hair, and are over and over fashionable. Of course I’m talking about Tehran, I have only wild ideas about the countryside or smaller cities.
After few hours of driving, we arrive at the ski resort. While my friends are putting on their equipment, I quickly run to a small rental place (out of two) and rent some ski-shoes and a pair of ski.
We buy some tickets, and off we go to the piste. At the lower station we meet other expat friends (actually the whole resort is swarmed by expats), exchange some words, and then go take the lift.
It is snowing heavily and I am happy – the off-piste segments covered with 40cm of soft snow provide ample depth for playing around and as there are only few people skiing there is virtually no risk of hitting someone. I’m enjoying every single ride, jumping, curving, slaloming.
Time flies by, and after few hours we decide to go for the last one and go home. We just have one more ride, we pack our things, and go back to Tehran for a nice, calm shisha.
At least that was the plan until I hit a huge pile of snow in maximum speed and find myself catapulted in the air.
At moments like this, there are basically two things that pass through my brain.
The first one is that adrenalin is an amazing thing and enables to change our ability to perceive things in crazy ways.
The second things is that heavy shit is happening and this will be an amazing story to tell to my grandkids one day the scars fade out, bones are healed, and both physical and emotional trauma goes away.
Everything slows down, I feel as I’m leaning back, I’ll soon fall on my back. Few moments of silence, pure weightless joy of flying in the air are followed by a painful landing on my left shoulder. I hear a strong, unhealthy cracking sound and hit my head on the snow. Everything turns black for a brief moment.
The vision kicks back in and I try to re-focus. First things first, check if I am alive or not. The snow smells still like snow and my head hurts a bit, so I guess I’m still alive. I look around and don’t smell nor see any blood. Legs seem to be working as well. I take a deep breath, check if my ribs are doing fine. So far so good.
But then I try to get up and support my torso with my left arm and find out that it feels… funny.
I can’t use my left arm. The strength is just not there. I stay laying on my back for few more seconds and try to calm down by breathing into my abdomen.
I hear as three of my friends arrive and immediately try to take care of me.
“Michal! Are you OK?!”
“No, I’d say that I’m rather fucked up.”
I thought that the dash of sarcasm would turn out funny, but only reaction I get are my three friends watching me in silence as I am lying in snow in a strange position. The awkward silence fills the waste space and I elaborate furter:
“I mean I am fine, but for some reason I can’t move my left arm.”
The youngest of my friends, a lovely girl from Australia, asks me: “Can you move your fingers?”
“Yeah, no problem with that.”
“In that case I think that it might be similar to what happened to my boyfriend. He dislocated his shoulder, but then when he went to the emergency room, they managed to put it back in.”
“Oh, good news then. Well in that case let’s slowly call someone and…”
“Michal, but I do have some bad news for you.”
“Oh… yes?”
“It doesn’t hurt right now, does it?”
“No, not really. That’s why I propose we call this guy with the cool looking bag for heavily injured people and let him take me back to the station so that they can fix my arm.”
“No. Michal, we should hurry up – you have maybe 7 minutes of a sanity window.”
“Sanity window? What happens after 7 minutes?”
“After that, the pain starts to be unbearable.”
The weight of my sigh could start an avalanche. I push all my weight on my right arm and manage to get up.
“Let’s go then.” I say, and start the really last ride.
I leave the air behind me sour, thoroughly polluted with a heavy concentration of the finest selection of my swear words.