Swedish Immigrant: Take Me to the Hospital

I have been very busy these last few weeks, and I haven't found the time to write. Summer hoisted me on its broad, sun-baked shoulders and ran away with me into the lush forests of the North. And into the emergency room. Seeing my brother in a neck brace, immobilized in a hospital bed and unusually quite made me sick; it flashed hot and cold and I prickled all over and I had to sit down and drink water:

As many of you already know, about a fortnight ago my brother set off to work a shift with Umeå Scenteknik, but at the warehouse, a pallet and a crate fell on him from a height of two meters and struck him in the face and on his foot.

God was truly watching over him as it could have been so much worse. If the pallet had struck farther up on his head his skull could have fractured; a little more to the left or the right his glasses could have cracked and gone into his eyes; a little lower down and he could have suffered a crushed windpipe. The pallet hit him squarely on the nose, on the bridge of his glasses (which, by the way, my uncle the optician had only days earlier joked that they looked like "protective goggles"), and he needed only two stitches to secure the skin. The cut is now almost healed completely with very little scarring.

As for his foot, Joel broke his fibula. He needed surgery to secure the loose piece of bone with a screw, though the doctors did not realize this until after he had limped around for ten days with a unwieldy and cumbersome mid-thigh cast. (The doctors were not incompetent; the bone piece had moved despite the cast that was supposed to stabilize his leg). Even with a broken bone, Joel has had very little accompanying pain and even managed to join us in all sorts of endeavours, like visiting the fair in Vännäs to look at trinkets and eat ice cream.