My grandma has always wanted to bring me to England. She lived there for the majority of her life and wanted to show me her old “stomping ground,” as she calls it. So we planned a trip where we’d be in London for a week and then spend a week in Spain to visit her sister. It was just the two of us, and we were so excited.
Once we arrived on Sept. 25, everything started out great. We got to our Airbnb and unpacked. On our first morning, we went for coffee and then headed to the National History Museum. We looked around for about 10 minutes before heading back downstairs. As my grandma takes her first step, she trips and falls down 15 concrete steps in the middle of a very busy museum.
I instantly ran to her and saw that her head was bleeding violently and she couldn’t move her arm. I was more terrified than I had ever been in my life and was convinced that she was going to die. The museum instantly called for an ambulance, which ended up taking over an hour to get to us. Once we finally got to the hospital she was brought to the RESUS unit where they fixed her dislocated arm. They did CTs and x-rays, and thankfully her head wound didn’t do any significant damage, but her elbow was severely broken.
(Aurora Doll)
I was told to leave and just come back in the morning as they have much stricter visiting rules there, so I made my way back to the Airbnb with no way to contact her or the hospital, trying to learn how to navigate a foreign country. I didn’t know where anything was or how to handle their cultural norms yet. Thankfully I caught a cab and found my way back after a lot of wrong turns.
I got there at 10 a.m the next day and they scheduled her surgery for the following Tuesday due to needing to wait for a specialist. The surgery included a bone graft, a metal plate, and pins. This also meant that we had to cancel the Spain portion of our trip. Unfortunately, once we arrived at the hospital that Tuesday, and waited for about six hours, the surgery was again postponed to Thursday.
London hospitals are very different from what we’re used to in America, rather than nurses having rankings like RN or LPN, they are referred to as junior and senior sisters. The lady in charge of the ward was called the “matron.” And with six to a room, things were extremely crowded.
My grandma and I decided that we should still try to make the best of our trip, during our days of waiting we decided to walk around Kensington and Chelsea and explore all of the places she hadn’t seen in years. After a day of walking through the parks and sightseeing, we ended up at a traditional Middle Eastern restaurant. My food wasn’t anything I was used to and tasted a bit off, but I wanted to be respectful so I ate the majority and then we headed back to where we were staying.
(Aurora Doll)
It didn’t take me long to recognize my error, as I got progressively sicker over the following days. It quickly became clear that I had salmonella. But as I said earlier we aren’t the kind of people to let things like this ruin our trip so we carried on galavanting around town. We went on a boat tour, to many different shops, and to Bubble Planet, a museum full of bubble-themed activities, and photo-ops.
Before we knew it, it was Thursday and we were back in the hospital, she was called to the back for surgery prep and I settled in for my 13-hour day of repeated coffee shop visits, TikTok, and locals starting political debates around me due to me being an American. In the end, her surgery went perfectly and we were nearing the end of our trip. While this trip was very eventful, my grandma and I agree that someday we definitely need a redo.
