Falling Up

I'm a do-er not a thinker.

While at the Emma Bowen Foundation conference in NYC in June, I made a very poor choice. Life is full of them, but this one left me bleeding and limping in heals for 3 days. No, I was not mugged; I fell up a down escalator.

I had to run back to my room to send a quick email for work before the conference started. As soon as I stepped onto the escalator to the lobby, I realized I had left my computer in the conference room. Now, when you are on a staircase and you realize you forgot something, you instinctively turn around and walk back up the stairs. This is a more difficult instinct to deal with when that staircase is moving in the opposite direction. On an escalator, your gut reaction should be to wait it out to the end of the moving vehicle and play it cool as you step back onto the opposite escalator and wave to the people you were just riding with.

When I turned to run up the moving treadmill, I immediately fell and tripped down an estimated 4-5 steps (it's difficult to say because the whole thing was moving at the time). I bounced back up embarrassed to have fallen on a (thankfully) empty escalator. That's about when I realized my knee was throbbing and my pair of industrial black tights were turning a discolored black.

At this point, I was a little disoriented, so instead of going back to the room to send my email, survey the damage and change tights, I marched right back into the conference room and sat down for the rest of the day. Sure I noticed the blood drying to my tights and the inability to bend my now grapefruit-sized knee, but I had a conference to attend.

At the end of the day, I hobbled back to my room to change into dinner attire. When I went to take off my tights, I realized just how bad it was. The tights had actually acted as a scab for the eight hours I sat in the conference, and ripping them off was literally like pealing my skin off.

Turns out there are no band-aids in hotels anymore, so I had to to walk in the middle of downtown Manhattan to the nearest drugstore with one legging pulled above my knee, so the clotting didn't happen all over again.

Hot. Effing. Mess.

Three takeaways from this experience:

1) Do not text the word pussing (meaning the junk that comes out of wounds, not the other thing) to Big Texas (my mom). It just doesn't look right in writing.

2) Never wear tights when I could potentially fall down.

3) Never wear tights.