Panic and Brokenness... Peace.

Anyone who knows me even a little knows that I'm not one for gore. I will not watch violent movies. I don't do well with blood. Even hearing a painful situation described will make my stomach turn. So when my grandma (Nagyi) came huffing and puffing into the house announcing that she had fallen and broken her wrist (approximately two seconds after I posted the last entry), I was in for the night of my life. ha. Because I'm such a big exaggerator, I usually just assume that everyone else is exaggerating too. Mmm. Not quite.

We decided that we must go to the emergency room, since her wrist was swelling rapidly. It was 10:30 pm as we pulled into the parking lot of the emergency room. Viktor was already teasing me about the "bloody people" we'd be seeing. My mom recommended not looking around, since she didn't know what to expect.

As we walked in the sliding doors, a guy was standing, covered in paint, and holding his arm. I began getting a little jumpy. (I was already feeling nauseous from my grandma's description.) I was trying to hold it together though, because I knew that it was Nagyi that needed help, not me... and so I didn't need to be drawing any attention away from her. But I began to get really uncomfortable. We walked past everyone waiting on the benches in the doorway. Viktor narrated what he was seeing, trying to make it as disturbing as possible.... until he realized I wasn't kidding.

We sat down on a bench... and we began to play "I Spy," as if we were still the six year old children waiting for the doctor, legs dangling off the edge of the waiting chair. I began to settle down a little.. still not really looking around (which makes "I Spy" rather difficult to play). Ambulances kept arriving, and they would occasionally wheel someone by on a gurney. I kept my eyes glued to the very interesting, pale tiles on the ground... wanting to wedge myself into the puny crevices between the tiles. I happened to look up at just the wrong time.... an old woman was limping by, her leg in a wrap that the blood was starting to seep through. Yes. My mind immediately overexaggerated the quarter-sized blood splotch to an orange-sized blood splotch, and I became physically hysterical. I knew I had to hold it together. I kept rationalizing with myself, but I couldn't hold it in. I stared at the woman across from me as I tried to hold in my uncontrollable, panicky laughter. I saw her prosthetic legs. Then I realized it was as if I was laughing at her. I panicked more, and lost control of the tears that I had been holding in for what seemed like eternity. They brimmed over, and spilled down my cheeks. I laughed awkwardly through my ridiculous tears. Viktor kept staring at me in complete disbelief. I was beyond embarrassed.

It was at this point that we realized we had forgotten something at home, so it was to my great relief that my mom turned to me and told me we had to go home. I begged her to leave me there, but she told me I had to practice... at any point in life I could be in a far more threatening situation. I had to get a grip on my physical reaction to such things in order to function reasonably rather than in hysterics over nothing.

My mom is like me when it comes to blood, gore, and violence. We're both visual. And we both can't handle it. The difference? My mom has learned to control her physical reaction to it, in order to act in an appropriate way. As we drove up the hill and back down again to the hospital, she explained the need to have a "bank" of positive, powerful images that can overwhelm any horrible image -- to occupy the mind. So even if you're looking at something terrifying, you can overcome it and block it out with an image of something beautiful. You have to train your mind to delight in the beautiful, and to concentrate on these things in order be able to function even in the face of shock, blood, or anything else.

So with this in mind I lumbered back to face my fears that sat enthroned on the benches of the emergency room at János Korház. Nagyi was holding up super, and I felt incredibly selfish that I was the one demanding all the attention, when there was really no reason for me to be acting the way I was. I buried my nose in my pink, tiny-print bible and read psalm after psalm. I read about peace, about God's love reaching higher than the heavens, I read Psalm 23... and hardly noticed the guy on the gurney with the bloody head, the woman with the dog bite on her arm, the man with a broken leg, a bloody hand... Peace in the middle of such brokenness.

After some X-rays, a consensus that indeed her wrist was broken, and waiting for the doctor to put Nagyi in a cast, we were ready to go home. She is doing all right... in fact, it's making her slow down, and allows us to help her when otherwise we don't. We're learning her secret recipes, dusting and vacuuming (the Hungarian way!), and learning patience through it all....