I got a tour of Tri-Lakes ER Tuesday, having been the last link in a three-car, chain reaction collision at Keating Road and Trianon.

My injury was slight to none, but I was caught between whether to go to the emergency room and feel foolish for being there or waking up the following morning in pain from previously undetected injury and having to hear I-told-you-so. I drove myself to the ER in the car that was worse-licked than I was but still very drivable.

I expected a long wait. They were busy. A courteous and efficient admitting clerk told me that it might be awhile.

But it wasn’t. There was a wait, but within reason, especially considering, as I learned later, that the ER was having one of its busiest nights so far this year. It gets like that in ERs everywhere when more hours of afternoon daylight combine with warmer weather. Folks figure out all sorts of fool ways to bang themselves up.

The ER was hustling. The first medical person I encountered was RN Jamie Harmon. He was personable, like all the other Harmons I know hereabouts, but not directly kin to any of them as far as we could learn between blood pressure and temperature readings and medical questions.
Later another RN introduced herself. She was Allison Cole, the niece of former Panolian employee Sheila Briscoe Brownlee, also the niece of Gene and Linda Goodnite. She told me that she remembered as a child coming to the newspaper office to visit her aunt working there, not so many years ago. I appreciated her introducing herself and making the connection. Every new day I live, the world just gets smaller.

ER Doctor David Berry was downright cheerful about his work, as though he was glad to see me, deflecting my apology for having taken up his time for so little reason. He ordered a CT scan as a precaution.

We had a wreck reunion of sorts. The other two drivers had more justification for being there than me, but their injuries also proved minor. After speaking to the young man who had been the first link in the chain, I remembered a similar crash about 20 years ago. My son David was the driver as we returned from Enid Dam pulling a rag-tag fishing boat he’d scrounged up for himself. We soundly rear-ended a driver who had stopped on Highway 51, waiting to make a left turn.

As David and I had talked about it later, we both recalled that the last sight, before we looked up and realized that the car ahead was stopped and we were too close and moving too fast to avoid a crash, had been a fat man on a riding lawn mower. Shirtless and flab-flapping, he was mowing the grass in his yard next to the highway. We’ve blamed him for distracting us ever since.

After the CT scan found no problem, they settled for giving me a large shot in the butt and sent me home. Throughout that ER visit I kept thinking about how I’d be passing right by Zaxby’s chicken when I left. The more I thought about it, the better that chicken tasted.

I picked up some fried chicken fingers, took them home, ate every one of them along with most of the accompanying fries, went to bed, slept soundly and awoke the next morning refreshed and without any residual pain.

Powerful medicine, that fried chicken.