Secret Subject Swap: ER Story

 

Welcome to another Secret Subject Swap. This week 12 brave bloggers picked a secret subject for someone else and were assigned a secret subject to interpret in their own style. Today we are all simultaneously divulging our topics and submitting our posts.

 

 

Here are links to all the sites now featuring Secret Subject Swap posts. Sit back, grab a cup, and check them all out. See you there:

 

Baking In A Tornado

The Insomniac's Dream

The Gamer's Corner

Moms Don't Say That

Stacy Sews and Schools

Home on Deranged

Juicebox Confession

Discovering Me

The Black Sheep Mom

Spatulas on Parade

Confessions of a part-time working mom

Rants From My Crazy Kitchen

 

My subject is Write a post in which you use the following words at least one time:  Emergency Room, splint, blood sample, roller skates, helmet, crowd, guy with a neck tattoo. It was submitted by Moms Don't Say That. Here goes:

 

This is a true story. Or a semi-mostly-pretty-much true story, which is the only kind of story I tell.

 

About 10 years ago I decided I wanted roller blades. Not roller skates, that would be for a slightly more sane person. No, I wanted roller blades. And arm and knee pads because I’m not totally insane, just semi-wackadoodle.

 

For my birthday my husband went to a sporting goods store and bought me a pair. I tend to be fairly coordinated and at 5 feet tall have a low center of balance, but I did not do as well on them as I thought. I could start and I could go, but the stop thing was an issue. In the street in front of our house I could just run up onto the lawn, so that wasn’t really a problem when I first started out.

 

At the time, we lived down the street from a park with wide open parking lots and trails around a lake and I thought it would be fun to practice there. It turns out lots of people would roller blade there and I’d ask the ones who seemed to know what they were doing to show me how to stop. While stopping for me consisted of hitting the ground, they actually could use those rear break pad thingies. No matter what I tried, it just seemed like my skates were so much faster than everyone else’s, but in reality I think it was that they were in control of their skates where clearly my skates were showing me who was boss. Well, my skates and that pesky ground gravel. They were double teaming me.

 

One day a friend, who happened to be an Emergency Room nurse, and who also happened to be extremely athletic, asked if I wanted to go roller blading on the paths by the lake while the kids were in school. We met in our skates and protective gear at the entrance to the park closest to her house, not where I usually enter. The first thing she wanted to know was why I didn’t have a helmet. I told her I tried but couldn’t find one to fit my A$$, which was the body part most frequently slamming into the concrete. My preference was to attach a pillow to my butt but hadn’t yet found a way to get it to stay there, so wrist and knee pads was it.

 

That entrance to the park was at the bottom of a short hill. Perfect for a woman who doesn’t know how to use her brakes. Of course I fell . . . yes, before we even got into the park . . . skinned both palms and left a little blood sample on the sidewalk.

 

I think my friend was reconsidering, but I assured her that once on the paths I’d be fine. I got tripped up a few times by pebbles both real and imagined but all in all kept just enough blood in my veins to sustain life. Winning.

 

There are many paths around the lake and the one we were on was new to me. So imagine my surprise when we hit the end of the path where a huge steep hill went straight down into the parking lot. On the other side of the parking lot is a lake, but I don’t even want to think about that. This hill was huge. Did I say huge? Oh, it was huge. And steep.

 

I started down trying my best to use my brakes but it was having no impact. I tried going side to side like on my snow skis but the path was only 2 feet wide, way too small to make turns. So straight down I went.

 

Bent at the waist (no idea why), arms waving and skate wheels turning so fast I swear they were throwing up sparks, I rolled through the entire first parking lot at the speed of light, somehow veered myself to the right (thought I was gonna go into the lake, didn’t you?) down a short stretch of concrete to a second parking lot, through that whole parking lot and finally straight onto a patch of grass where I less-than-graciously smashed down onto my unhelmeted (and now permanently flattened) rear end.

 

Of course a crowd gathered around the stunned genius with the broken A$$, and amongst the onlookers was the answer to the mystery of why everyone else was so much better at controlling their roller blades than I was. As my friend was trying to assess my ability to move, I overheard a guy with a neck tattoo ask his friend a very revealing question: “if she doesn’t know how to skate, what the hell is she doing using racing wheels?” 

Racing wheels? Holy hell, I've got racing wheels?

 

My friend wanted to take me to the Emergency Room. I didn’t want to go but I knew the quickest way out of this embarrassing situation would be to let her get her car and drive me out of there. I intended to dedicate my life to making sure I never had to see anyone in that particular crowd ever again.

 

In the ER they tried to take a blood sample but I insisted that I’d given all the blood I could spare for one day. I waited in a curtained room for hours because, of course, a broken butt isn’t high on the emergency priority list. But eventually a Doctor came in carrying a splint (for my A$$?). I recognized him immediately . . . kill me now. . .  the guy with a neck tattoo. He didn’t just come in with a splint though, he came in with an ultimatum: he could fit me for a butt splint and I could keep on skating, or I just might want to consider taking up baking.

 

By the way, as of the next morning my husband was no longer the beneficiary of my life insurance policies. And before he bought me any future “gifts”, I made sure he knew it.
 

 

Peanut Butter Cup Cookies

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Peanut Butter Cup Cookies

                            ©www.BakingInATornado.com

 

Printable Recipe

                                                                   
Ingredients:
1 stick butter, softened
1 stick margarine, softened
1 cup white sugar
½ cup brown sugar
2 tsp vanilla
2 cups flour
¾ cup baking cocoa
1 tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
48 mini Reese’s cups
 
Directions:
*Cream the butter, margarine, both sugars and the vanilla. Mix in the flour, baking cocoa, baking soda and salt. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for one hour.
*Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Roll dough into approximately 48 ¾ inch balls. Bake on ungreased cookie sheets for 12 minutes.
*As soon as they come out of the oven, push a mini Reese’s cup into the center of each cookie.
*Allow to cool on the cookie sheets for 3 minutes. Remove carefully and allow to cool completely.