Nosebleed
Shelby Dyer
©
Copyright 2018 by Shelby Dyer
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For
as long as I can remember, I have always been terrified of
nosebleeds. They have always been regular occurrences throughout my
lifetime and the bloody inconveniences affect everyone in my family,
especially during the dry seasons. The fluctuating Colorado weather
that surrounded me was not cooperative to these reappearances,
either. But it wasn’t until I was around eight years of age did
I develop an unnecessarily dramatic horror to even the smallest
scarlet droplets seeping down anyone’s face.
During
one particular winter break in my elementary school days, my family
went to my aunt Jean's house to visit her for the holidays. It was
Christmas Eve and the living museum she called home blended in with
the surrounding crystalline white powder that had been floating down
from the sky for days. The paint on the wood boards was cracked and
peeling and the window panes were thick and coated with a film of
fog, but it had a familiar comfort to it. That house had always been
my favorite, the dainty two-story townhouse, decades old, with a
picket fence around the porch that opened up from the second story.
The inside had the most recognizable musty smell of an old house
lingering about and the floorboard chirped and creaked with every
step. The entire backyard was sheltered by large vegetation and trees
and we had our own tire swing underneath one of the biggest oaks. The
ancient house even came with a cement bomb shelter underground in the
back that my siblings and I teased and taunted each other to go into
alone on our summer breaks.
Aunt
Jean was technically my second aunt, being my father's mom's sister.
But to an eight-year-old, aunt was more comprehensible. She was
quiet and too old to have any energy to create a close relationship
with us younger kids as long as I knew her, but living nearby made
visiting easy and my siblings and I were over there regularly when my
parents needed someone to babysit. We raked the leaves in the yard
during the fall and planted flowers in the spring. Aunt Jean let us
do just about whatever we wanted so long as we didn't bother her and
cleaned up any mess we made.
But
on this particular afternoon, with the whole family trudging into her
living room, shaking off the snow from our shoulders and boots, I
created a bigger mess than my small self could even handle. Knowing
she wasn't going to be able to leave her house for the holidays, we
wanted to give her some company before we visited the rest of the
family. My mother, father, sister and I sat with her on her two
maroon chaise lounges that wrapped along the walls of the living
room. We made brief conversation while our teeth and our legs shook
and shivered from the cold we had just escaped. But my body had
bigger plans. Giving me no time to adjust to the warmth, blood
started streaming down my nose, getting everywhere. Being familiar
with nosebleeds, my parents rushed up to get me tissues and we
expected it to go away in no time. But in less than a minute, I was
in need of more tissues already. I remember my mother getting up many
times to get me handfuls and handfuls of paper towels (because
tissues, now, were not absorbent enough), while my father rubbed my
back and my sister watched with Aunt Jean. An hour later, my body was
still refused to create any blockage to the blood flow.
Being
an eight-year-old and at the size I was, the amount of blood loss at
that point became concerning to the adults. I still had disregarded
any sense of danger and my sister didn't seem to understand what was
happening, either. But my mother, who had been pacing from the
kitchen to the living room with more paper towel every time was
deciding it was time to call 911 and seek medical advice. It felt
like an eternity in that house, sitting on my dad's lap with my head
tilted back and switching out paper towels like clockwork. When the
fire department came with an ambulance behind them, the neighborhood
became a crime scene in my imagination. At eight, I had not once
encountered any fireman, policeman, or paramedics in uniform besides
seeing them in the news or movies. And only ever in those situations
is it very serious. Instantly realizing this made the scenario in my
head feel catastrophic. I began to wonder if this was it, the end of
my very short lifetime. If I closed my eyes, I was never going to
wake up and my lifeless body would be left here of my father's lap in
front of my family and these servicemen and women all because of a
nosebleed.
We
moved to the front porch to avoid any other messes, my nose still an
uncontrollable stream of red iron juice and me becoming a restless
and scared child. My neighbor and longtime best friend's father was a
firefighter in town at the time and was on the porch that day with
all of us providing the most comfort I could have gotten in that
situation. Him and a couple other firemen, a team of paramedics, Aunt
Jean, my mother, my sister, and I on my father's lap, sat in the
sunroom porch on Christmas Eve for hours, just waiting. I found humor
in those small, square patches of cloth that the paramedics
continually handed me, exactly like those that nurses put on your arm
to stop the bleeding after you get a shot. They were unfortunately
small and thin and did nothing to stop the bleeding. But they were
handing to me every few seconds knowing that's all they really could
do, meanwhile, the trashcan was filling up rapidly and there was no
sign of changes.
Several
hours since we had arrived and my nosebleed had begun, we were antsy
for it to stop. The firefighters and paramedics had decided there was
nothing more for them to do, and advised that I be taken to the
emergency room for more medical attention. Thoughtfully aware of how
expensive an ambulance trip across town would be and simply how
terrifying it would be for an eight-year-old little girl, my parents
mutually agreed we would just wait and go in if it got any worse. And
luckily for me, around half an hour after they left, it stopped and
my heart rate subsided.
That
afternoon in the small townhouse I had only ever associated pure and
virtuous childhood memories in became a place of straight
melodramatic trauma. From then on, any nosebleed I have gotten
triggers immediate recollection to that day for a brief moment. A
split-second of flashbacks is now followed by an amusing recollection
of the naivete and innocence of thinking the worst in something so
small like a nosebleed.
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