MY LIFE, PART 23: What have you been doing, you little rascal?
An eternal drive to the hospital.
I was lying on the ground. It didn’t look good.
Both bones were broken.
The calf bone and the shinbone.
Everyone who was at the pitch ran to me: players, coaches, parents. My dad wasn’t there, although he usually went to all my games. But that day they didn’t let him leave work early.
It hurt so much and it was getting worse. Nowadays you’d just call an ambulance, but back then there was no such luxury. Fortunately one of the dads (our right-back Ondra Lieser’s dad) was there. They carefully put me on the backseat of his pale brown Škoda 105 and off we went.
I was filthy from the slag, didn’t even take off my football shirt.
The car sped through Plzeň and my broken leg was jumping up and down because there was no one to hold it in place. I screamed in pain, I couldn’t take it. Americká street was the worst, because it was cobbled. As the car skipped on the cobblestones, I thought I was going to go crazy with the pain. Bump, bump, bump, and with every bump my heart echoed and my whole body ached.
The drive to the hospital was endless, and no one knew I was going to spend two more hours in the waiting room.
I’d never been to the hospital before, this was my first time. I was lying on a bench in the hallway, leg burning with pain, and I couldn’t do anything. I was just listening to the wailing of the ambulances outside the hospital. The nurses were running around frantically and I was just looking on. They had just brought in several injured constructions workers; a scaffolding had collapsed somewhere. It was carnage. Screaming and lots of blood. They were taking them straight to surgery.
After an hour a nurse came and asked me what had happened to me. I was just lying there, in my football shirt, squeaking in pain. “I was playing football,” I mumbled.
I couldn’t take the pain anymore. “My leg hurts so much. What do I do?” I begged her.
She just flicked her hair back. “Look at that little girl over there. She’s in a lot of pain too, but do you see her wailing like this?”
Oh, right. There was a little girl in colourful pyjamas lying in front of me, tears streaming down her face. She must have been three years old, tops. She had ugly black spots all over her body: her arms, her face, her neck. They took her in before me.
Even an eighty-year-old lady, who was brought in much later than me, was admitted before I was. She was sitting on a wheelchair and seemed completely calm. She didn’t fit in with the bloody scene, she was serene, just waiting to be taken to the X-ray room.
She had her arm wrapped in a handkerchief. I realised something was off. Yikes, her right arm! The old lady had an open fracture, the bone was sticking out.
Then a second nurse leaned over me. She looked much nicer than the other one. “What have you been doing, little boy?” she asked.
“Playing football,” I said again.
“Hum, not sure if you’re ever going to play again,” she whispered to herself as she turned away. I heard her. And I started crying.
P.S. Next week - Chapter 24
