"Were you in an accident?"

He had introduced himself as a paramedic student. I've had experience with them now—edited their med school applications, learned about their Most Meaningful Experiences, helped them turn ER encounters into metaphors for their commitment to diversity and positive bedside manner.

"No," I tell him. He's sketching down notes in a little pocket-sized notepad. Attentive as heck.

"Can you tell me what happened?"

I'm a professional hospital-goer; of course I can. I just don't particularly want to. Stepped off my back porch wrong, went down like a sack of wet bricks. That's what you get for living in a city built on a swamp. The ground just... sinks sometimes. One inch to the left, and instead of solid ground, I'm effectively stepping in a whole.

As I tell the story again and again to this EMT, that EMT, this nurse, that student, I wonder how I look. 42 years old, living along in a big house, crunched my ankle because I dismounted from a back porch step incorrectly. I know their questions—"Did you hit your head?" "Do you have a history of accidents like this?"—are what you have to ask. But they feel almost accusatory. As though they're prying into me, looking through me, wondering if my doddering old years have begun at last.

I'm just grateful my grandfather missed this life event by a year and a half. Every time I walked in or out of the back door, he'd insist I was going to hurt myself on that porch. He'd tell me to be careful, don't slip, don't break your leg. If he were still around, I'd be alternating between listening to lectures about how my shoes are to blame and watching him sketch increasingly elaborate plans for railings.

The EMT with me is an anime fan. We talk about the Sailor Moon café, about me working for Crunchyroll, about how Fullmetal Alchemist is good. It takes a while to get me to a room. The place is packed with police in black uniforms. Two men from the sheriff's office in brown uniforms. As I'm finally wheeled to my room, I see a young man in a Batman shirt, handcuffed to a gurney, one officer over each shoulder. I begin wondering which vigilantes would get themselves caught while wearing their own logo. Eventually I settle on the coward's answer: Deadpool would get caught in a Batman shirt.

I'm in my room. Maybe it's where Charlie's room was the second time I took him into the hospital. Maybe it's just very similar. For a moment I'm back there, holding his hand at 2am as his eyes are pressed tight shut, his hand not closing around mine. I remember wondering if I'd be there when he passed, hurriedly calling on my coping mechanisms for holding guinea pigs as they died, then getting angry at myself for even comparing the two. Then my fucking ankle hurts like hell again.

Before when I'd touched it, lying in my backyard and wondering if this was a 911 situation, I could swear it felt like the whole thing was twisted around and jacked up. The shape of my ankle had felt alien under my fingers, like a Barbie foot that's gotten twisted funny in the toybox. Now it looks swollen and bruised, but not alien. The nurses aren't even fully sure it's broken. That would be amazing. One calls it a third-degree sprain: not great, but not a fracture.

The X-ray machine comes to me. I've been in the hospital a lot, but there are always several years between visits. Enough that things have changed considerably every time I have an ailment. There's a tiny fracture after all: a tiny bit of the end of a bone has chipped, but nothing's out of place. They splint my leg up, wrap it in Ace bandages. The bandages are too tight and the splint cuts into the back of my knee. Fortunately I can take it off to shower and wrap it back up. Not just now, though, not while the splint is setting.

"Bend your knee," the nurse who made the splint says as he tries to teach me to use crutches.

I can't. I realize this is a problem. Tomorrow I'll go through every kitchen knife until I find one that cuts through the hardened splint, bringing the back edge down low enough that it doesn't stab me with every move. For now, I deal.

I get home that night with instructions and phone numbers and prescriptions. My friends help me set things up so I can navigate my house. It helps that Charlie installed a lot of hand-holds in the downstairs bathroom. I'm thinking of the positives. At least it's my left foot that's hurt, so I can still drive. At least I work from home, so I can take things easy. At least most of my away-from-home activities involve sitting down and rolling dice.

Again I think about what Charlie would say. He'd be raging. That back porch—me hurting myself stepping off that back porch wrong—was a constant for him. One of his many constants. All the things I'd mess myself up doing, all the things I'd do wrong. As embarrassed as I am to have hurt myself like this, I can't help thinking: The thing happened as he predicted, but I'm still okay.

He was wrong about so many things. But even the thing he was right about is eminently survivable.

If I can walk (well, limp) away from even his worst-case scenarios, how much taller should I walk away from the times he's been wrong.