Not a good way to spend the last day of vaction

Content Warning: physical injury, blood

I sat down on the St. Charles streetcar bench behind the driver, dragging my suitcase behind me, and waited for dad to climb up the very high stairs into the car along with his suitcase after me. He sat down and his face was scrunched up in pain. He hunched over to one side.

“You OK?” I asked. Earlier today as we left the hotel room to check out, he had complained about diarhea so I knew he might be getting sick. We had planned to have a nice light day sightseeing New Orleans from the trolley car before going to the airport to fly home.

“I barked my shin on the stair getting in,” he said, “and I’m bleeding.”

“Are you going to be OK?” I had no real idea of the gravity of this and other than his discomforted face he was not giving off any sense of urgency.

“Yeah, it is what it is,” he said.

“Do we need to get off and take care of it?”

“No, I’ll be alright” he grumbled.

The streetcar rollled on for a bit and more people got on and I, feeling self-conscious of the space I was taking up that was meant for older and disabled folks, moved back to one of the forward facing benches. I asked dad to move back toward me and he made a pained face, but eventually got up and slowly, against the movement of the car, made his way back the five or six feet to sit next to me.

People around me were looking at dad. More people got on the train. And eventually someone said, “Are you going to be alright, hun? You’ve lost a lot of blood.” That phrase snapped me out of my complacency. I looked at dad, and then looked past him to where he had been sitting, and I will never ever forget the sight of a pool of crimson blood about 8 to 10 inches across on the floor of that fucking New Orleans streetcar.

“Holy shit dad! That’s bad.” I pulled out the black rag I keep in my messenger bag for general cleanup and handed it to him to staunch the blood. I started googling for nearby drugstores. And time slowed to a crawl as my dad was rapidly bleeding out in New Orleans.

Another older white guy gave my dad a camo-colored handkerchief when my black rag didn’t really do the job. “You can tie that around your leg, maybe stop the bleeding.” He offered. Walgreens was behind us. e could have gotten bandages and materials for a field dressing. Dad was in “I don’t want to be a burden” mode and kept saying it would be OK. It was not OK. Even with the tactical kerchief dad had an injury that was not going to stop bleeding in the next ten minutes.

People would ask him if he was alright, and dad kept saying the same phrase. “Oh, I barked my shin getting up those stairs.” like that was a normal thing, in a way that did not explain at all the bloody socks and shoes and circle of blood around his left foot.

Eventually the driver noticed all the blood. “Can’t have that,” he muttered, and then pulled out his walkie and called in a cleaning crew. I found another nearby CVS store and pursuaded dad to get off so we can try to bandage him up. It was a two block walk and dad was insistent that he could not make it. He had been walking so much on this trip and he was tired and apparently his wound was tender. “I’ll just wait here,” he insisted, and I could not budge him.

I bought what I thought was the right stuff, some non-stick sterile pads, some tape that I thought was self-sticking, some sanitary wipes, a pair of small scisors, some water for dad and a Gatorade for me. I had not eaten anything since breakfast, a sausage and egg sandwich and some coffee, but the sight of dad’s blood had frightened any sense of hunger out of me.

Dad insisted (he did that a lot during this whole incident) that he was not dizzy or light-headed. But I knew that it was wild that there was this much blood for a small scrape. I knew we needed a trained eye to look at this, not some doofus who has to look away when a nurse draws his blood.

I made a somewhat OK field dressing, the whole time thinking “I am not a cleric!” I was in full adhd emergency mode, just doing what needs to be done and not taking any shit from the universe. But dad’s socks were blood-soaked, his pants brown, blood still oozed from under the gauze. What the Hell would this look like at TSA? What if he kept bleeding and needed another bandage on the plane? This was insanity.

There had been an urgent care next to the CVS. I argued with dad that he needed to see a professional, have this wound cleaned, and professionally bandaged to make sure there were no complications. Dad thought we should go straight to the airport and hope he could get urgent care there. I begged him to walk with me the two blocks to the urgent care and he insisted he could not. We called an Uber for him.

The Uber driver, a middle aged black man named Gary, asked us if the driver had taken or given any information about it. “No, he called it in, but he did not say anything to us.” Gary chastised us, even though I told him we were not locals. “Don’t do that, man. They have a responsiblity. You got injured on the streetcar. They owe you.” Gary was right but it was too late to do anything about that.

The urgent care staff were a bit surprised but overall professional and helpful. Luckily dad has the best health insurance our country offers to non-Congresscritters and high Federal officials and it was all covered, though at one point, when I was putting pressure on dad’s shin to help it stop bleeding so much so the PA could bandage it for real, I did joke about it costing an arm and a leg.

We left that room looking like a knife-fight had taken place. Of course! Dad bled so freely from what would normally be a small wound (he had torn a flap of skin about the size of half a quarter or less) because he is on blood thinners. Blood thinners! He seriously could have lost so much blood.

We spent a good hour and half at that urgent care, under the calm hands of Sterling, the PA. Dad was bandaged twice, because getting his bloody pants off pulled down the first bandage. But the wound was sealed using some strips of medical tape, so it was just a matter of re-wrapping the gauze and self-sticking tape. Dad was able to change out his socks and pants and looked somewhat normal again, and not a wounded soldier, or a victim on the verge of zombification. “OK, I admit it, you were right,” he said, “this was a good idea.”

And we made it to the airport a little late, but got through security, boarding, deboarding in Denver and re-boarding, landing in Portland and the Uber drive home, all in one piece. Dad walked a little slower than normal but now he was shrugging the whole thing off.

Dad apologized out of shame for being not as strong as he used to be and I tried to set his mind at ease. “It’s fine, dad; you fall down, I’ll patch you back up.” I love my dad but his stoicism is a barrier. Shrugging off a wound is not strength; asking for help is strength. I wish he would be stronger that way, especially as his days on this side of the dirt are coming to a close.

And now it’s a story for the ages. This morning, after doing some laundry, dad said “I got all the blood out of these pants,” which, you have to admit, is a badass thing to say to close out a vaction.