Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Saturday, November 1, 2008

I’ve had a few minor medical wakeup calls these past few months — enough to make me question if I’ve been living with the consciousness I desire. In September, in moving some desks out of my old office on North Main Street, I came up with the hare-brained idea of testing the spring on an obsolete typewriter lift.

Boy, did it ever work! Only problem is my middle finger on my right hand was idling beneath the desktop when I performed the test. The mechanism sprang up fast and furious, coming within a fraction of an inch of guillotining my finger. Luckily, a narrow gap beneath where the wood board backing met the desk bottom saved my finger. It did slice my finger as I’ve never been cut before, producing a cascade of blood first and, today, more than a month later, a large and memorable scar. (I have to give myself a little credit for doing something right. Instead of panicking, I continued counting my blessings as the blood was pouring. Among them, the fact that my quick-witted, cool-headed niece, Kasia Urbanska, the daughter of my physician cousin in Poland, was on hand to bind the wound with some stray take-out napkins, tape it, and accompany me to the emergeny room for stitches.)

That same week, a gum infection flared in my mouth. The dental hygenist suspected that not flossing properly had inadvertently packed some food in my gums. If only her diagnosis were correct.

After seeing my dentist twice and driving to Winston-Salem to consult a crown specialist, I was told that the tooth was beyond salvation. “It’s cracked and will have to come out,” the specialist told me.

So there I sat on October 6, in the chair of an oral surgeon named Dr. Paul Bailey in Mount Airy, around the corner from my old office on North Main. Dr. Bailey worked quickly, professionally. He numbed my gums and made his extraction, presenting as evidence the long No. 2 tooth with its crack extending all the way to the roots.

That night, stretched out on my sofa, I went through the cotton gauze pads blotting blood and nursing more than a little self-pity. What is the problem here? I berated myself. Are you just plain falling apart? I tallied the time and money that had gone to doctors and dentists of late.

The phone rang. I hadn’t been taking calls. I gave Henry the excuse that I wasn’t up to talking to anyone.

Something told me to pick up the phone.

Dr. Bailey, the oral surgeon, was on the other end, asking how I was doing.

Even in small towns where people routinely go out of their way to help out, this was unusual. I made a few garden-variety gripes, inquired how long I had to wait till I could swim again, then asked him how my tooth could have cracked. “Isn’t this a little unusual?” I asked.

Yes, it is somewhat unusual, he allowed. “Maybe you chewed some ice or something cracked your tooth when you weren’t paying attention.”

Then he said that that day had been his first in the office after having been out for five weeks.

Long vacation? I inquired.

A long pause. “No. I lost my son at the end of August. Biking accident.”

Stunned, I listened. His 31-year-old son was a biking enthusiast, musician and environmental advocate. He had just completed his first year of Wake Forest University Law School and left a wife and baby son. It was a freak accident that occurred in midday when he was headed to Wake Forest to identify a good biking route from his home in Tobaccoville. I remembered reading about Scott Bailey’s death in the “Winston-Salem Journal.” I remember feeling the pain of a promising life cut short and worrying once again for the safety of bicycle commuters. I remember being moved by the photograph of a handsome man in a straw hat with a powerful jaw and strong moral compass etched on his face. I couldn’t begin to imagine the grief his father must be feeling.

Dr. Bailey had been on my website, curious about my work, certain that his late son would have approved. He wanted to buy one of my books, he told me, for his son’s widow, Terri Flagg.

You’re not going to buy it, I said. I’m going to give it to you. The next day, I autographed a copy of “Moving to a Small Town” for Terri and dropped it by his office. (Terri is someone I’ve since had the privilege of meeting twice.)

That night, before he hung up, Dr. Bailey apologized for “venting.”

“Venting?” I said. “You’re not venting. You’re talking. I can’t imagine what you have gone through. Call any time you want to talk.”

When I put down the phone, everything had changed perspective. My own problems seemed pretty petty.

My young son stood in front of me, eyeing me curiously. “Your voice has suddenly come back,” he noted, with the budding irony of a middle schooler.

I had just stepped into an O Henry story and relearned the lesson that in any situation in life, you never know what the other person is going through. It is a humbling lesson, one worth remembering every day.