Wherein I tell a story of the non-fictional kind

It's rare that I put myself into situations where I could hurt myself. Even more rare that I actually get hurt. I'm not the type of kid who would jump off of shit, I wouldn't ride the swing as high as I could to fly off to a broken leg, or the kind to play chicken or do anything like that. I've been hit by a car once, when I was six. It was the Portland winter, nighttime and pitch black and I was wearing this itchy faux-fur coat that made me look like a baby black bear, I was running across the road, just because it was daring and stupid and I wanted to be a badass like my friend who lived across the street. So I ran. And doubled back the instant the car headlights appeared, to run right into the car. I flew straight up, like a piece of baby bear popcorn. Nothing more than a few scrapes.
The last and only time I went to the emergency room was for a UTI that blasted to full on bleeding within two or three days of my having sex.
Where is this leading, you may ask?
Yesterday afternoon, Usul and Lyra and I were walking over the interstate in Asheville, NC. Nothing too exciting to report up to that, but looking down on the on-ramp we noted a very freshly found piece of roadkill on the onramp. And, Usul being Usul, ultimate survivor, collector of roadkill pelts, persuaded me to walk down and poke at it and see if it was usable. Only we get to the soon-to-be pelt, and it's nowhere close to a pelt, it's a very live...muskrat? We're unsure, but we pick it off of the freeway and sit down with it. It doesn't look like it's going to die anytime soon, but it's in shock and bleeding from the mouth and still trying to very half-heartedly get away. I stare at it and the blood smeared road and cry and cry and wipe the tears away because it's too cold to cry in this weather. It felt like a very overwhelming hate of civilization and industrialization and the even more overwhelming fear that I'm far too dependent on it, for how much I hate it, I can't leave it. And this little broken animal represents all of that, in one single body of fur and blood and helplessness. We can't leave it out in the 20 degree weather to die, we can't kill it (it's really not in either of us) and so into the backpack it goes, wrapped in Usul's sweater. We can't take it back to Radio's, Radio is having something of a...hard time as it is and doesn't want what sounds like a more than half dead animal at her house. She's also lost her cat of thirteen years, and is almost beyond distraught. It has been a tough week for her.
And so we call Gabrielle. Gabrielle is beyond amazing. She lives in a shack behind a house, not so much of a shack as a little cabin. It's ten by twenty feet or so, with a loft and ladder and cast-iron stove and the only light after dark comes from candles and lamps, it embodies the 'living simple' ideal. She plays the guitar, violin, a very well trained voice that sounds like she was raised in the south, and not in the house that I lived with her mother at in NE Portland. And she takes us up on our desperate plea for a place for what we identify as a ground hog, and who I have now named Johnathan Taylor Thomas. And we take him there and start a fire and Usul puts Mullen on his wounds. He is very cute and fluffy and curls up to sleep. Gabrielle comes home and sees him, Lyra comes over and sees him. He is still very cute. Who couldn't love JTT? And then Gabrielle leaves to see her neighbors and Usul and Lyra leave to go get some Yarrow and I sit and contemplate and stare into his face, lit by the firelight until he hides in his box of sweater. It doesn't look like he actually has too many smashed organs, but when he was hit he bit down on his tongue, and cut it in half. It's still stuck on his teeth. He doesn't move it too much. I call my mom, the nurse, who tells me to maybe offer him water. Had common sense kicked in at this point, I would remember that the folklore surrounding groundhogs is focused on their hibernating tendencies, meaning their ability to live for a long period of time (granted, in a kind of stasis) without consuming food or water, but, well, common sense comes and goes in my case. So I begin to try and give him water. He sniffs it, but is unsure, so I try to better position him for it, and he tries to scramble out of the box. I am nervous, as I am still aware that this is a very wild and scared-out-of-it's-mind animal I am holding in my hands, but reason that he probably won't bite me though his own tongue. And here I am, cradling him, when the open heart of the oven sputters and spits out a half burning log and showers the wood floor with sparks and suddenly I have a ground hog hanging off of my middle finger by it's teeth.
Panic ensues. I deposit Johnathan Taylor Thomas on the floor and dump the water I was trying to feed him on the sparks and stare at him and the fire and start trying to clean the water and ash and then remember my hand is bleeding all over the place. So I run outside and call Radio to contact Usul and can only talk to Radio and I keep asking for Usul over and over and, as I can now tell this morning, by the blood drops, start pacing the porch in a kind of frenzy. I can't think straight with the adrenalin now pumping through my heart and brain and turning off my language and reasoning functions and I'm stumbling and stopping and now the blood is freezing on my hand in little crystals and Radio tells me she has to come pick me up because she's with her mom and she'll take me to the hospital and I really, really don't want to go to the hospital because that UTI cost me five hundred dollars at the ER, but Radio insists and all I can think about is the blood all over the floor and I very cautiously drag JTT outside and then under the porch and at first he tries to get back in and then gives up once I close the door and it just lays there in a pile of depressed and frightened groundhog and it breaks my heart a lot. And so Radio comes and picks me up. And the ER people love me, I mean, love me. This is the best story of their night, I'm whisked from nurse to nurse, one of them gives me this whole goodie bag full of bandages and stuff and he wanders around trying to find me small latex gloves as an extra prize and he tells me about his twenty-two year old son who's not in college, and to go get another bite because it was so damn boring on this Friday night. They tell me not to be embarrassed, it was a kind thing to do and that the needle will pinch some, and to wrap the wound ever so carefully.
One tetanus shot later, here I am. My finger is pretty swollen, and I think I'll be opting for the all invasive plantain plant that grows in the front yard instead of antibiotics and JTT has crawled off somewhere, hopefully it is warm and he is happy and Gabrielle didn't make me clean off the front porch, and so I left my mark, with fluorescent colored red splotches commemorating the most dramatic Friday night of this trip so far.

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Love you all,
Savannah