Part Sixteen: Ode to My Boot-tai

*Disclaimer - the conversations below are to the best of my recollection.

This past Sunday, I finally found the answer to the age-old riddle, “What’s large and white and dangerous and makes you more thankful than you’ve ever been for your overly plump, well-endowed bebadonkadonk?” I’ll tell you. It turns out that the answer is a giant white SUV barreling into your right buttcheek at an alarming speed, sending you and your ample behind flying into the air.

So it finally happened. After all of those times I’ve said, “I can eat that. I mean, life is short. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow,” it finally happened. Except it wasn’t a bus and it didn’t kill me.

What did happen was this:

On the eve of my self-imposed six weeks of veganism, I wanted to do it up. I’m talking a huge-ass burger with bacon and cheese and truffle fries from the Jolly Pumpkin (I’ve had lots of personal issues with the service there, but most of their food is consistently delicious) and that exquisite little ramekin of truffle aioli that comes with it, mmm mmm mmm! So I called ahead to the restaurant and placed my order. They said it would be 15 minutes. I got all set and went downtown. Parking, as always, is at a premium down there, so I drove around for a little while until I found a great spot - kitty corner from the restaurant pretty much, just on the northwest corner of the intersection of Liberty and Main, on Liberty, right outside the Greek restaurant there. So I pulled into the spot and a police car pulls in behind me.

“Oh crapturdles,” I thought (or some vulgar equivalent).

I checked my rearview a couple of times. Their lights weren’t on, but then again they weren’t really in a spot…were they just giving me a warning? Did this have absolutely nothing to do with me? (Let me just say for the record though, that never before in my life had I had a police car pull up behind me and not proceed to legally admonish me in some way, so naturally, I assumed - even though I couldn’t think of anything - that I had done something wrong). Well, the next move some of you who read this will no doubt characterize as one of the lamest moves of all time (but I was raised largely Roman Catholic I tell you, and even though I was fighting from the age of seven to not go to church, I assure you that the guilt still seeped in to my being - oh god the guilt - anyway…), I got out of my car and walked up to the window of the police car to ask if they were pulling me over.

The officer rolled down his window. “Are you pulling me over?” I asked. “No.” he said. “Unless there is something you’ve done that you want to tell me about.” I opened my mouth, ready to give a witty (or more realistically, probably a decently socially awkward) retort, and then I think I remember one of the police yelling something, but I was too distracted by the headlights and the sound of acceleration coming up on my right. By the time I started to turn my head, I only had time to make out a headlight, and the white paint surrounding the right front end of an SUV before it jammed into the upper right quadrant of my patootie.

I don’t remember being in the air, but I do have a vague recollection of one of the SUV’s headlights smashing on impact, and my arm kind of brushing the back of my car as I came back down to the pavement; right on my tailbone. It felt extremely unpleasant, like a robot knocking you off stage with a well-timed steel hip in some ill-fated musical number, or the worst bumper car crash you’ve been in times ten. I never lost consciousness and I did not hit my head, but I was shocked as hell. It was surreal.

I landed on my tailbone, with my hands down, and I remember my ankles hurting because they had been suddenly thrown off-kilter. The instant I realized what had happened and that I had a rip-roaring pain in my tailbone region, I remembered all of my training from years of watching television cop dramas and ER and I was like, “Okay Palmer, wiggle your toes. If you can wiggle your toes you’re going to be OK.” So I wiggled my toes, and it was good.

I had landed pretty much right between the police car and my parked car, but I was still sticking out into the street a little bit. However, if I’ve learned anything else from my cop drama schooling, it was that if you suspect a neck or spinal injury, you shouldn’t move. So, doing my best impression of someone who was in a full body cast, I reached out for my phone (which was, much to my surprise, still intact) and said aloud to myself and the officer who had gotten out of his car to block me from traffic and call the ambulance, “Oh my god, I need to call Andrew.”

One of the police officers had gotten out of the car and asked if I was “OK,” while his partner rocketed down the street once he cleared me, with his sirens blaring, chasing the person who had hit me and had kept right on going without even slowing his roll one iota. (And I’ll tell you what, the look I caught on the officer’s face as he sped away was so determined that I wanted to raise my arms and yell “YEAH!”, but instead I just sat gingerly on the pavement and tried to assess the damage between spurts of inane laughter and saying, “This is surreal. This is so surreal!) I answered that I didn’t really know and in response to being asked where I was hurt, I knew without a doubt that my tailbone was the epicenter of my trauma.

I mean, I was still kind of laughing a bit - it seemed so utterly absurd and surreal, and kind of like something out of a Muppet sketch. Strange to not be split open on the sidewalk or dead after an event like that; once I took a measure of the situation though, my main concern was swelling, and I said as much to the officer and Andrew on the phone - what if something swelled on my tailbone or in my back, what if I lost the ability to feel or wiggle my toes? What if, what if, what if? Pushing those thoughts aside for the sake of comedy though (I have, pretty much no matter what, always been able to laugh at myself and the absurdity of situations), and seeing as I wasn’t dead and had not hit my head or lost any limbs, I started immediately cracking jokes. And I’ll tell you what, the officer and I both got a laugh when he heard me tell Andrew, “Baby, I’ve never been so happy in my whole life to have some junk in the trunk!”

You see I was aware, even in these first few moments, somehow, that my bootie had, in some estimation, saved my life.

I don’t know how, I don’t know why, because if things had just been minutely different it could have gone in a much, much worse and potentially devastatingly permanent direction, but the patron saint of big butts was apparently smiling down that night. I’m not religious really at all, but my Mom’s whole side of the family really is (this is the aforementioned Roman Catholic upbringing), and I admit, I don’t mind the good vibes. I think if your heart is in the right place, and you don’t hurt yourself or others, than it’s all good baby. So when my cousin called me later on Monday after it happened and said, “Thank god for the Murray butt, right?” I couldn’t have agreed more.

As my cousin Alice says (a different cousin; on my Mom’s side I have 26 first cousins alone; as I said, very Roman Catholic :) they have a term down under in Australia where she lives for women shaped like we are, “We are a family of barge-arse women”, and she’s absolutely right. Even the men in the Murray family are barge-arse women. (From the back we can all tell who’s related, let me just put it that way; come on, you all know who you are and you all know it’s true. And honestly, I couldn’t be prouder! The Murray clan just has those child bearing hips and a badonkadonk to match, and after many years, I’m going to go ahead and own that. Wear my pants proudly even though they never have enough fabric in the back - holla if you hear me - but I digress…)

So back to the tale at hand: I was telling my boyfriend over the phone that I had just been hit by a car. He said, “Wait, your car was hit by a car, or you were hit by a car?” I replied, “My body was hit by a car.” He wanted to know if he should meet me at the hospital or pick up the car, and I had no idea. “Well, are they calling you an ambulance?” he asked. I turned to the police officer, “Are you calling me an ambulance?”

The officer: “Oh yeah.”

“Well, honey, they’re calling me an ambulance. You should probably come pick up the car and then meet me at the ER.” He was going to call me back, and within two minutes it seemed the ambulance (and a fire truck, and another police car) were there at the intersection. All of a sudden, I was in the camera’s point of view on the cop dramas; getting the neck brace on, being slid on a count of three on to a back board, having six faces over me in an oval lifting me up onto the gurney. It was bizarre. Andrew called back as I was being put in the brace, and I shot my hand out toward the officer who had stayed with me and was now holding my wallet - “Can you answer it? It’s my boyfriend.” He very kindly did and saw that my wallet and keys got to Andrew as well. He also made sure to give me my phone back before I went off to the hospital.

Then I was in the ambulance. The whole time on the street and in the ambulance I had a wonderful paramedic with me, talking to me the whole way, and I didn’t get his name. (I wish I had because my Mom and I would like to send him a thank you. My Mom also wants the names of the police who helped me, and she and I will be thanking them too. They were wonderful. I will be trying to get all of their names so we can follow through with the thank you's.)

Andrew got to the ER shortly after I did, and then it was roughly three hours of being on spinal precautions, having x-rays taken to make sure I didn’t have a fractured pelvis and having my urine checked to make sure that the hit hadn’t ruptured my kidney. Throughout this entire time, we kept hearing a rather rough-looking gentleman in the main corridor demanding, amongst other things that I cannot mention here for they are far too lewd - and far too hilarious to be FCC friendly - chicken soup and crackers. We were both completely grateful for the comic relief. It kept us laughing up until the doctor came back in and informed me that my official diagnosis was, “a severely bruised buttock.”

When I asked the doctor about going back to work, he recommended that I sit on a pillow and walk as much as I can. When I asked him about when I could start bellydancing again, he said through a congenial snort of laughter, “Well, do you need the income?”

All in all, it could have been so much worse; wow. I still can’t believe it actually happened, but I am reminded every time I try to lift my arms above my waist or attempt to turn too far to the right…or sleep, or go to the bathroom…pretty much when I am just breathing, but anyway, I have never been so grateful for my big butt in my whole life, and I said as much to Andrew as we were walking out of the emergency room.

And he replied, “We are all very grateful for your big butt honey.”

More confessions of a (very) curvy girl will come out every Wednesday. Also, look out for the two new “Curvy Girl” supplements, “Unfit” and “Food/Foe Thought.”

Elizabeth Palmer is the Customer Advocate at AnnArbor.com as well as a contributor. She writes about food and food traditions, sustainable development and her experiences as a curvy girl. She has a bachelor’s degree in photography and is finishing her masters in historic preservation. Elizabeth also teaches a course on sustainable development at Eastern Michigan University.

You can contact Elizabeth by e-mailing her at elizabethpalmer@annarbor.com.