Written on September 15th, 2009
Today was going great. I woke up before the alarm but not at 3:00am like the morning before. Six o’clock on the dot. Wide awake and really hungry. You know the hungry like you haven’t eaten in a week. Or what one would imagine a week of no food to feel like. Perhaps I exercised in my dreams all night.
I had planned on going to work out tomorrow. Big plans that were shot all in about what felt like minutes but really was probably only about 3 seconds. When we got to Washington, D.C this morning, I helped a passenger stuck in a neck brace up the jet bridge with his backpack into the gate area. We joked about him not beating himself up anymore. “Be careful”, I insist, little did I know to take my own advise.
As I walked back down to my aircraft, I fell on an uneven part of the ramp. Something I know is there that I walk over at least once a given day while working and yet somehow I managed to step down just right (or should I say wrong) as to catapult myself forward in what I can only imagine an ungraceful decent. If you can imagine a long tunnel who’s sections extend one from another in order to reach it’s target. As each section pulls from itself getting longer and longer, it leaves a smaller ramp that is usually only difficult to pull your suitcase up and over. Add in the steep hill that it causes to reach a lower entryway and hopefully you can imagine what happened. If only I had just allowed myself to fall. If only there wasn’t an entire crew of peers watching my every move. I may have been hurt a little less both physically and in my pride.
What really happened is that I tried not to fall an instead twisted out of the way of a wheelchair passenger and in to the jet bridge controls and wall. I claimed to be just fine and blew it off. Even as I sat inside with my own crew massaging my neck discreetly, I tried desperately not to show the growing pain. It’s a little hard to hide the fact that your neck is swelling and no longer able to turn to the side that they are talking on. Ugh! OK, fine. I hurt myself. I didn’t realize that the other flight attendant on this trip saw what happened but didn’t want to say anything unless I did. A couple of Excedrin dulled the pain enough to get the aircraft and the passengers back to Cincinnati but after that I was done. I feel bad calling in sick but I can’t work like this. Can you blame me? Now, I wait for the bus to take me home where hopefully I still have some pain pills and a bag of ice.
I think that working out tomorrow will have to wait a few days.