A History of Injuries

Falls, fractures, scars, and finally learning my limits.

The family story was amusing, a drunken Scottish doctor, me on a doorstep in London, age three, smashing milk bottles. And then kneeling in that broken glass. Getting stitched up by that doctor who squinted at the gaping wound and apparently stitched it up with something like a fishing line. I found the scar useful for remembering my right from my left. I never thought about the other details like being alone on a doorstep at age three, breaking milk bottles. And why was this doctor drunk?

photo by Clay Banks

Still, I survived and at age ten continued to fall off the ice-covered roof outside my bedroom in a test run of a fire escape from the attic. When I landed on the frozen ground with a crack. I knew my arm was broken but I was also dazzled by the ice storm that had transformed our house on a farm in rural New Jersey to a glittering fairyland, each twig and spiky weed encased in a shining coat. Finally, I went upstairs to my parents’ bedroom, walked over to my father’s side of the bed and gently shook him awake, my left arm dangling, broken at my side.

“What did you do?” my mother shouted.
“I broke my arm, maybe,” I said.
“Take her to the ER,” my mother said, turning over.

The trip to the ER was a terrifying journey along frozen roads but I was alone with my daddy and that was a rare thing. He didn’t yell at me. In the ER there was a crowd of people who had slipped on the ice. One boy a little older than me was sitting with his mom, holding an ice pack against his head.

“Who are you?” he kept saying to his mother.
“I’m your mother!” she answered every time.
I thought he was faking.

When we finally saw the nurse she said, “Her arm is broken.” I was scheduled for surgery the next morning, but I had to spend the night. This was 1967 when health care was simple. If you were hurt, you received medical attention. They put me in a room and my dad stayed for a while. I was not allowed to eat anything until the surgery was performed. The next day my mom came with a bag of cookies the neighbor had brought over. They prepped me for surgery and then left me alone. I proceeded to eat as many cookies as possible despite being told I might die from throwing up during the operation. I was starving and figured it probably wouldn’t happen. I never threw up even when everyone else was doing it. We had taken an ocean liner home from Europe and passed near a hurricane. The passengers were tied into their bunks, and no one showed up for meals except me and some old lady.

Anyway, I didn’t die, people drew on my cast and after a few months the cast was cut off. My arm looked disgusting, and I was afraid to unbend it but at some point, I lost my fear and went back to cartwheels and prison dodge.

After I had finally decided to try and be a full-time actor and writer, I was a barista at an Italian coffee shop on the Upper East Side whose customers were mainly well-heeled locals and, because we were close to Sloan Kettering, Jimmy Breslin, the journalist, whose wife was dying in the hospital. Breslin was a nice man, a good tipper but quiet and probably sad since his wife was so sick. One day I was doored on my bike by a cab and arrived at work in pain as I had landed on my hand. I started making coffee and the pain was very bad. After a while, my hand started to swell and throb, but when I showed it to one of my regulars, a doctor from the hospital, he glanced at it and said, “It’s not broken. You couldn’t stand the pain if it was broken.” Well, it was broken. Because I never elevated it, the hand just kept swelling until my shift was over. I locked my bike up and went to the ER.

In December of 2016, after the misery of that terrible election, I was sneaking out of my mother’s house hoping to avoid waking her up as we needed to return to Chicago and leaving always made her sad. I decided to let my husband continue to sleep and picking up several bags, I started to descend the stairs. At about halfway down I slipped and fell, my left leg remaining behind as the rest of me continued to tumble. It was bad, very bad. I fainted briefly, woke up to see my husband standing at the top of the stairs and said, “I think I’m badly hurt. Don’t wake up my mother. I can make it to Pittsburgh.” Then I fainted again. At the ER we were triaged by a nice nurse who took one look at the X-ray and told us I would need surgery, it was a pilon fracture and despite several jabs of morphine the pain was breathtaking. My husband was due at work the next day and we didn’t want to have the surgery in New Jersey, so we decided to drive home.

Given a prescription for painkillers, we stopped at the local CVS and my husband took so long I decided I wanted to die and would crawl into the middle of the road and get run over. As I rested for a moment, my head in the gutter, he returned with the drugs, I took them and he proceeded to drive from New Jersey to Chicago with a badly injured, incredibly stoned woman in the back seat.

After horrendous surgery, I didn’t walk for three months.

I like my scars. I actually think being non-weight-bearing for those months helped me have a better understanding of how insufficient the accommodations for those that are physically challenged are. This was made very clear when I fell off my trolley on the platform of the L train in Chicago and I was stepped over until my husband realized I had failed to follow him and finally turned around. I think it’s also helped with accepting the new normal of getting older. While I swim more than a mile three mornings a week and take several challenging exercise classes, I finally know my limits.

Lately, I started cold plunging, which is both awful and wonderful but also, since all you do is wade into Lake Michigan and sit, it is almost impossible for me to hurt myself.

Molly Moynahan