I’m not sure the lapse of time we spent in the ambulance on the way to this first hospital, everyone was so panicked. But to be honest, those “vitamins” must’ve been kicking me from the inside because I was feeling great. I don’t remember looking at the outside of this hospital, so I’m not really sure what was around it or what it looked like. I had never heard of the city we were in and all I knew was that I was drugged and unsure, so I told Dillon to grab my phone out of my purse and call my dad. Having divorced parents, I had to make the decision on which parent would react the least emotionally at that time, so dad was the answer. In retrospect, I feel maybe a little bad for giving that responsibility to Dillon. I knew they had to be told, but I didn’t want to do it out of fear of getting worked up, tears preventing me from having productive conversation with either parent. I wasn’t even sure what I would tell them yet, because I wasn’t even sure what was going on, so maybe I subconsciously gave the power to Dillon to decide how to summarize because I knew he would.

 

Within seconds of the phone call, Dillon was handing the phone to me, and predictably, I said “Hi dad,” as I had to tell him through tears that I was sitting in a dirty gurney after an equipment malfunction let me fall 15 feet out of a high ropes course. It was the first of a few hundred times I would learn to say that phrase. I told him hurriedly that I really needed to go and that I did not call mom, because she would freak out. I said I had to find out more and call him later. As I’m sure you could guess, my dad called my mom almost immediately. She called me with the same terror I was feeling in her voice, and I wasn’t sure if she was more worried about me or mad that I hadn’t called her first.

 

Now as dramatic as I typically am, I am truly not exaggerating when I say I was rolled into what I imagine prison would look like. It was almost as if it were abandoned as well; they rolled me through hallways full of burnt out lights and we hadn’t seen another human until we got to the second floor. I was in a nightmare--they rolled me into a dirty yellow room, while one nurse ran all over the place looking for someone to help us.

 

They insisted that I go to the bathroom, and wondering how that would happen, I just nodded and agreed, unsure of what my other option was. I did chug a water bottle while on the course, but the water must’ve been absorbed in shock by the rest of my body, because I felt no urge to release. What I didn’t know was that going to the bathroom would involve bridging my pelvis and peeing in what looked like the stove pan in my mother’s kitchen. I made Dillon leave the room, he had already seen way more than he signed up for.

 

I hate to really think about this, but lifting up my body the way I did with the injury I had just obtained, could have been my one way ticket to never walking again. The medical knowledge of the people that were dealing with me as a patient was so minimal compared to the medical personnel I was used to, it felt illegal.

 

When I was done being forced to do my business, they whipped me all over the hospital, seeing other old people with glazed over eyes slowly teetering down the hall, almost shocked to see fresh meat in the building. They pulled me into a room that was hotter than the outside, so pretty damn hot. There were about 50 flies circulating, immediately drawn to the layer of salt over my skin from the sweat and tears. A rounder bald man approached, smoking a cigarette. Yep, a cigarette in the hospital. My medical caretaker at that time was smoking a cigarette as he was about to administer a medical test on me. He slid me into this strange plastic machine, not an MRI, but something of the sort. Even after knowing I had a potential spinal injury, the cigarette man slapped flies off of my legs and stomach, smiling as if he was doing me a favor.

 

I remember him, blowing his smoke in the air, rolling me not very carefully to the next room, where we could look at the single computer screen in the whole establishment. He showed me a picture of my spine, but it was blurred and my knowledge of vertebrae was probably on par with his.

 

“You broke vertebrae Nikol. You go home tomorrow,” he said.

 

“Surgery?” I asked, imitating a knife with my hand in case he didn’t understand what I was saying.

 

He blew a whiff of tobacco at my face, instantly swirling through my nostrils, “No! No! You go home. You fine, Nikol.”

 

Well, that was a relief. The first emotion I felt was instant sadness that I was going to have to leave my Birthright program. I was so sure that I was going to just have a sore tailbone at first, that I thought maybe I’d just have a “damn good bruise tomorrow.” But, I guess a broken vertebrae meant I had to go home, a quick ending to my short-lived trip of a lifetime.

 

The nurses didn’t seem to feel as relieved as I did though, they told me our next stop was the state hospital, almost two hours away, to get another opinion. They urgently rolled me through the hallway, as my screeching returned with every crevasse we hit on the roughly tiled floor. Dillon eventually took over for the guy in the front, being about 110% more careful pulling me in the stretcher than any Macedonian medical attendant I had come across yet. By the time we had gotten down to the first floor again, the ambulance driver had gone missing and we waited as I laid there in the stretcher, still soaked in sweat. I was starting to look like I hadn’t bathed in many years. I finally called my dad back to update him, but he insisted that we Facetime instead, so that we didn’t waste money on data. I’m sure he was pleased to see my red and swollen cheeks, wiped raw by the tissues everyone touched me with.

 

When the driver finally returned, I got reloaded onto the ambulance and was honestly feeling pretty okay, or maybe I had just run out of tears. I had just been told that I was fine, I was in the ambulance on the way to a more qualified doctor I hoped, and the pain was much less than before (aside from the driver still nailing every bump on the road without remorse).

 

“Nikol are you hungry?” the nurse asked me as the ambulance pulled over at a cafe on the side of the road in Štip.

 

“Actually yes, I’m starving,” I remember saying back.

 

“Well actually, Nikol, you no eat,” the nurse said as she got out of the ambulance with the other nurse (who must’ve spoke no English, because she hadn’t talked to me yet) to go get food. I guess they had offered some to Dillon and the babysitter’s friend as well, but they refused because they felt much more guilty than the nurses did about eating in front of a trauma patient, especially one who couldn’t.

 

They sent the nurses to the front seat when they came back with food and came and sat in the back with me. Dillon concernedly flicked the bubbles out of my IV that were definitely not supposed to be there, though the nurse said everything was "perfect." Apparently we had just as much medical training as the people I was allowing to hold my life in their hands.

 

After the nurses took their sweet time eating their mouth watering sandwiches that I wasn’t allowed to have, they finally came back and all four people stared at me as I distracted myself by either playing on my phone or staring out the back window, predicting when we'd hit another pothole. My bent legs were now the ones frozen, I hadn’t moved them since untangling myself below the ropes. I started to drift asleep and according to my phone had slept for about 20 minutes in the boiling hot ambulance, basically cooking in my frying pan of a stretcher before a nurse noticed and yelled at me to wake up. “No sleep NIKOL!” she said abruptly. I was not only mad that she startled me enough to shoot pain up my back, but also because both of the nurses had been sleeping too, with their nasty socks and legs shoved between my legs. Yes. No shoes. In between the legs of and touching the broken patient.

 

There was minimal talking the remainder of the way to the second hospital in Skopje, mostly because we were all extremely tired but also because we were all at a loss for words.