“Well, I didn’t pack that,” she insisted and then made a hissing sound. “I would never encourage anyone to wear a half shirt.”
The truth of the matter was that I had no idea where or how that shirt got on my body, but I know I got it out of my suitcase. So someone packed it, and that somebody made a fool out of me that night. (Gina.)
The next morning I woke up feeling like I had been in a head-on collision with Rebel Wilson. I couldn’t move, never mind think of going skiing.
Shelly came in to check on me and feel my forehead. My side of the bed was soaking wet.
“She says she can’t move,” Gina told her, as if I was faking it.
“I’m going to stay here with you,” Shelly said. Shelly would do anything for me and that made me want to cry, so I told her she needed to go skiing or I would cry all day.
I woke up three hours later and called down to the spa to get a manicure and pedicure. What I really wanted was a foot massage, but I was too embarrassed to ask for that directly. As I got on the elevator, I started to feel light-headed. I barely made it to the spa, and in my delirium, I thought the spa would be the equivalent of a hospital and could aid in curing whatever leprosy I had caught. Once on the table I drifted in and out of consciousness until a German man wearing a stethoscope woke me up with smelling salts after I had fallen off the table and onto the floor.
“You have a very bad fever.”
Is there such a thing as a good fever? People annoy me when they qualify a cold as being bad. Isn’t that kind of implied when you get the cold in the first place? It’s the same thing as calling someone a creepy clown. What clown isn’t fucking creepy? As if anyone’s ever said, You know that really well-rounded clown with the good body and charming personality? Well, he’s coming over for dinner.
“Ve need to get you into ze ice bath,” he told me as he and a woman helped me to my feet.
“I love ice.”
I had lost all sense of my equilibrium and had never been so incoherent. I felt like I had gotten a DUI on a submarine and then had been forced to snorkel back up to the surface.
The doctor hauled my body from the spa up to my hotel room with his arm around my waist and my arm around his shoulder. There were already hotel employees gathered in my bathroom dumping ice into the bathtub and filling the tub with water. It seemed as though I was watching a movie of myself, and I remember being confused about whether I was really sick or I had a case of Munchausen syndrome. I took off my clothes and sat down on the bathroom floor in my bra and underwear. The doctor and a woman lifted me back up and told me to put one leg in the tub.
“Should I take off my underwear?”
“No.”
“Are you getting in, too?” I asked the doctor, ready to accept the idea of rape. I didn’t have any fight in me.
“Get in ze tub!”
“I’m not Jewish,” I repeated several times before passing out. I remember noticing that my toes looked perfectly manicured. People weren’t exaggerating about Swiss spas. When I woke up, I was in my bed. I knew the girls had returned from skiing because I heard mingling in the next room.
I tried to get out of bed but was so physically weak I only had the strength to moan. Shelly ran in when she heard me. I felt so bad for myself I started crying, which made Shelly cry. We were both crying, and I was naked.
She rubbed my forehead and told me that the doctor said my fever had broken, but that I would be very weak for the next day or two and to take it easy.
“Do you think I’m allergic to trains?” I asked her.
“Maybe,” she said, rubbing my head, tears in her eyes.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Six.”
“P.m. or a.m.?”
“P.m.”
“Okay, wake me up tomorrow,” I told her and fell back asleep. I woke up fifteen hours later and heard rumbling in the main living room. It was 9 a.m. I felt better and got out of bed and walked into the living room naked in the hopes of my body appearing so gaunt, the girls would gasp.
“I’m ready to ski.”
The skiing was beautiful. Our ski guide’s name was Johann. It turns out that in Switzerland there aren’t ski guides with any other names. We skied for about three hours. Right before we were going to stop for lunch, I asked Johann if we could work on some moguls, since the conditions were so good and I was skiing so well. The greatest part about skiing there was that the runs were really wide and there weren’t very many people on them. The not-so-great part was that because of the width and light, you have no idea how steep the mountain is. That was when the snow hit the fan.
I was minding my own business skiing down a double black diamond at around forty-five miles an hour with my legs in the same position they would need to be in order to birth a midsized kangaroo. My skis didn’t come off, and from the clicking sound I heard during my wipeout, I was certain the bottom halves of both my legs had separated from my thighs and were already on the chairlift back up the mountain. Once I stopped writhing in pain and pounding my forehead into the snow, I looked up at Johann who, in perfectly low-key fashion, informed me that I had just torn my ACL and that a helicopter of Nazis were on their way to medevac me to the nearest burn unit. Then he offered me a cigarette.
To add insult to injury, I was dead sober, and I hate getting injured when I’m sober. This proves my theory that sobriety is not for me and is, in fact, for the birds. The helicopter landed and three big hot Swiss EMTs got out. One of them yelled at Gina, Shelly, and Sue—who were all filming me on their iPhones—to back the fuck away. The propeller was blowing the snow in every direction as two guys ran over to me.
“Are you in pain?” one asked. I was in pain. I was in a tremendous amount of pain, but for some reason I told him no.
“No morphine?” he asked.
“I meant, yes. I am in pain.”
“Would you like some morphine?” he asked again, pulling a liquid vial out of his ski jacket.
“Yes, and I have a very high tolerance for drugs, so whatever you normally give someone, double it.” I have never had morphine, and it had been on my bucket list since I saw my mother die. The last three days of her life were the happiest I’d ever seen her.
I smiled at the EMT. What a good sport I am, I thought. The three guys lifted me up onto the stretcher. One of the Germans attached my stretcher to his boots and skied me down to the helicopter. Once they skied me closer to the helicopter, which was noisier and seemingly much more dramatic, Johann wrapped his arms around my head to protect me from the propeller-driven wind and snow. I was more than a little turned on by this move.
I’d like to go on record and say that Germans are the worst.
Not only do I love helicopters, but we were flying right over the Matterhorn and it was an incredible view. The morphine was amazing, and I felt like I was on top of the world. I was trying to take pictures with the pilots while we were flying and they wouldn’t even smile.
The female doctor at the hospital was the biggest German bitch I had ever encountered in a medical facility—and needless to say, I’ve been to a lot. I’ve had numerous injuries as well as many elective procedures done in order to amplify my coordination. Never had someone aside from a receptionist been lacking in empathy. Why would a person get into the medical field just so they could be mean to people at work in addition to being a bitch at home?
I was left alone in an examining room long enough to call whomever I was dating at the time, then my sister, then my doctor in LA, who patched me through to an orthopedic specialist, who asked me if I could pop my knee in and out of its socket. I tried and I could, and then I couldn’t stop doing it because it was so weird. The doctor on call walked into the examining room, took one look at me on the phone, and angrily pulled the curtain shut before I could even tell her that I was speaking with my doctor.