This Kid K-needs A K-nurse!

This happened when I was eleven years old, in year seven at secondary school. I was running late one morning, due to my younger brother throwing a strop over not wanting to go to school. As a result, I was riding my bike as fast as I could down the pavement on the street my school was on. Until, that is, I saw a fire officer’s car coming the other way. Being a pre-teen obsessed with shiny things — which a red and reflective yellow livery most definitely was — I lifted a hand to wave to the car’s occupant.

And I promptly fell off my bike. 

To his credit, the fire officer immediately stopped his car and came over to check on me. I was mostly unhurt, apart from a few grazes and an impressively skinned knee where I’d slid along a few feet. I remember being more worried about my brand new tights — completely shredded — than the multiple places I was bleeding from.

The fire officer got me loaded into the front seat of his car and my bike into the back, and he turned round to take me the rest of the way to school. He carried me to the visitor’s reception and plonked me down into one of the chairs there.

He asked the receptionist to call the nurse up from her office to come take care of me. The receptionist was unwilling to do so. I don’t remember the full conversation, as it’s been quite a few years since then, but the receptionist was arguing that the school, and therefore the school nurse, was not responsible for dealing with anything that happened off of school grounds, even if it happened on the way to school and practically within sight of the gates.

An offer was made to have an older student, a sixth-former who’d made the mistake of wandering into sight at the wrong time, escort the fire officer and me down to the nurse’s office. The receptionist dismissed the possibility that the nurse should be the one coming to a student with an injured leg. I was just faking it, by her estimation.

The sixth-former wasn’t stupid, though, and ran off during the argument — straight to the nurse’s office. He did what the receptionist wasn’t willing to do and told the nurse that she was needed in the visitor’s reception. A few minutes later, she arrived, and she promptly tore a strip off the receptionist while simultaneously reassuring me and getting all the bleeding bits bandaged up.

The fire officer left once he knew I was being taken care of, leaving my bike in the care of the groundskeepers, whose office was next to the bike sheds. The nurse had the helpful sixth-former carry me round to the student reception and pastoral care area — through the staff corridor, which was a big treat at that age — so my parents could be called to come collect me and take me for a checkup and proper wound clean at hospital.

My leg was fine, but the experience left me with a nice scar on my knee. And a few days later, some of the little jerks I went to school with decided to shove me along a pebble-dashed wall so that my other knee was also ripped up.