I am a climber.

I never stand on escalators. I always climb.

This morning, as I climbed the escalators from the station, I tripped and fell forward onto my hands. It must have been a spectacular fall. I pushed myself up and stepped off the escalator. No one said anything. My recovery must have been convincing.

It hurt. It felt like the hurt from the impact from falling — tingly pain that would go away when I got used to the idea I wasn’t injured.

I kept walking and by the time I was waiting at an intersection to cross the road, I was wondering why the pain hadn’t gone away. I looked down at my heeled sandals. A flap of skin was hanging from my left toe.

A scrape! So I wasn’t unscathed. That explained the pain. I lifted my toes from the sandal and saw a pool of blood sitting in the shoe. Oh. This looked bad. That was a lot of blood.

As I stumped across the road, I wondered what to do when I got to work. At high school, I would have gone to the nurse’s office. There was no such place at work.

The problem was solved when I pushed the glass doors to enter the office. Margaret, our company’s librarian and the most grandmotherly figure I know, greeted me.

“Margaret, I fell!” I replied.

She accompanied me to my desk, sat me down and took off my shoe. Blood immediately flowed down my foot and dripped onto the carpet.

“Take these tissues, Joan, and put pressure on it,” Margaret said. “Now, this may seem silly but I’m going to take your shoe and go wash it.”

Paul, my boss, came over with some papers. “Joan!” he said, startled. “What happened? I was coming here to give you work to do but I can’t now. I’ll look for some first aiders.”

There is a system of designated first aid officers at work but at 8:20 AM, most of them hadn’t yet arrived. Later, someone told me that Paul had run through the eighth level calling for first aid. I wondered whether or not I should mention that I was a qualified first aider. Eventually, three first aiders rushed into the pod carrying a very big first aid kit.

The first order of business was to prop my leg up on a filing cabinet. Kristy and Heidi cleaned my foot to reveal a large but shallow gash in my toe. They sterilised and bandaged it, while Barry hovered around watchfully. He brought me a towel and a box to keep my foot elevated through the day as I sat at the computer.

“All better!” they declared, packed up the kit, filled in an incident report and waved goodbye.

I spent the day hopping through the office barefoot. All day, environment group people were asking me what happened. I even got a call from someone in our Morwell (Gippsland) office who had heard about my accident. In the evening, when I schmoozed at the Young Engineers Australia‘s Christmas drinks, I found out that even the water engineers and materials engineers had heard the news. I was a declared a hobblit.

My toe is still numb, bleeding and wrapped up like a Christmas present. The progress I have made in overcoming my fear of escalators may have just been set back.