We decided that we wanted to go tubing down a river to relax because, well, that's what you do when you go tubing, you relax. Or so we thought. This tubing happened to be a little bit more like shooting the somewhat tame rapids on an inner tube with a piece of plastic in the middle to keep ones bum from scraping against the rocks. This being Amanda's first tubing outing, we thought it might be fun. We had gotten a few minutes into our trip down the rive when we came upon our first rough part. I went down first to show her it was alright and she came down afterwards. She had gotten twisted around and ending up going down backwards and fell out of the tube. She came right back up kind of shocked cause well it is a mounting stream and it is cold! As soon as I got to her, she looked up and said "I think I broke my finger." I looked at her hand and noticed that all fingers were still pointing straight and pronounced that she couldn't have and let's continue on. It became apparent that something was not right and her left hand was throbbing. Since this was not the most relaxing trip that we thought it was going to be, we got out and took our tubes back.
As her hand warmed up, the pain increased intensely! So we did what we thought was normal and went to the ER, which we had to hunt for in this Appalachian town. I kept trying not to think of the SNL skit about Appalachian ER's, but well, their pretty true. We went to the receptionist and said that we needed to be seen and she asked us to take a seat, no name no nothing. We waited for a while and watched the locals, everybody knew or was related to everyone else, so it felt like West Virginia. After a while a nurse came out of a door and asked who was there for an emergency, we raised our hands and followed her. The asked what happened and proceeded to write everything down. There was a computer there, but I think it was just for show. We were seen in the ER anteroom by an number of nurses who all asked us what happened. They took us back to the ER where we got to wait in the Cardiac room where we were told that if someone came in with chest pains or was having a heart attack, we would have to clear out. The took Amanda back for X-Rays and brought back this:
The bone circled in red should look the the bone to the right of it. It was at this time we started noticing all of the posters and pamphlets for domestic violence around and then we started to understand why we were questioned separately about what had happened...
The doctor then saw Amanda and said all she needed was a finger splint and she would be good. He left and then came back after a while with this comment, "I don't know where my head was, somewhere in left field, but we are going to need something more than a splint." The hooked her up with a hand brace, nice brown on brown coloring, something that looked like a Powerglove prototype. When we were about to leave, we asked where we had to check out, they said you don't, you just walk out! All in all it was a fascinating experience.
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