I spent my New Year's Eve in hospital. San Francisco General Hospital, to be exact. And since I'm being exact, here's another tidbit: I'm still here. At hospital.

I have bruises on both arms and I've had body hair ripped off of me in many inglorious places. I've been stuck with sharp things. And these all happened after I got to the hospital.

No longer am I a person who's never had a broken bone—I now have two. No longer a person who's ever been in an ambulance. No longer a person who's never crashed his Vespa. No longer a person who's never been admitted to the hospital as an adult.

I'm still kind of a mess. I have two fractured ribs as a result of the accident. I still have a chest tube. I am still in the kinds of pain I wouldn't wish on anyone, even as a joke or a curse.

More people have seen my naked hairy ass here at hospital than they have in literallyminutes at Daddy's or the Lone Star.

Here's how it all went: I was heading over to J.'s in the Castro to drop off a gift and for him to do a huge favor for me. I headed up 17^th Street and had just crossed (after stopping) the intersection at Sanchez. It was raining lightly. There are MUNI tracks embedded the blacktop of the road surfaces there. I carefully, methodically—like I have done for the past seven years avoided the actual surfaces of the rails, especially when wet. Of course, I was going to be making a right turn onto Noe St., so I carefully, methodically, attentively—as I had done countless times before, maneuvered the Vespa across one of the tracks (I was driving on the pavement between two rails). The perfect combination of sliding and then catching in the groove in the pavement between rail and roadway knocked the vespa far enough out of travel angle that it caught, dumped me, and went skidding on ahead. As I had just come out of a stop sign at an intersection I was going no more than 15 mpg so for me, it was more like clumsily falling off the side of the Vespa—until my body hit the roadway.

Then I slid—skidded, really—and tumbled enough such that mid level of the right side of my ribcage on my back was positioned just right to slam into the tire of a parked car.

I was screaming in pain. Or rather I would have been screaming in pain had I not just had the wind knocked out of me. The real terror started when I was able to breath in what I thought were great lungfuls a few moments later, but I was still gasping as if I wasn't able to get enough oxygen.

I have many things to write about, but I'm still collecting my thoughts into an incoherent whole, and these kinds of futile tasks take time, people!

Suffice it to say that thanks to the grand loving actions taken by total strangers in San Francisco, the SF PD and the SF FD and the fine, fine overworked and underappreciated medical staff of SF General Hospital, I am on the mend—tho knowhere near mended.

This sucks...even more than the chest tube that's still drawing fluids and air out of my thorax. There is no upside. No matter how much I may learn from this and no matter how many friends I may make and no matter how much I've learned even more to appreciate my friends, my hubby and San Francisco in general, this episode sucks, has sucked, will suck, will continue to suck.

Pain is the devil, and the least spiritual thing I can think of.

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