When I left our house to go to work at the Local on Tuesday, March 3, 1998, it was like a thousand other mornings. It ended up as one in a thousand, however.

I stopped to mail a letter in a blue box at Willow Grove Avenue in front of Chestnut Hill Academy. (The box is not there anymore.) While rushing to get back to my car (it was raining hard), I slipped in a puddle and literally flew up in the air, landing hard in the street on my left side. I had fallen before, of course, sometimes winding up with a bruise and/or slight swelling or limp for a day or so.

But I knew right away that this fall was much, much worse. It felt as if I had been stabbed in the hip area with a huge knife, and every time I tried to move, it felt as if I was being stabbed again. The pain was a white hot flame with no mercy. I was lying in the middle of the street as cars whizzed by.

Somehow I managed to get in and out of the car and into the Local offices with the help of co-workers. I could not stand up because of the excruciating pain. Then-editor Marie Jones said I should be driven right to the emergency room at Chestnut Hill Hospital, but there was a time-sensitive front page article I had been working on that I had promised to finish.

Twice during the morning I had to be pushed in my chair down a hallway and into the bathroom, and I can truly say that ever since then I can empathize with wheelchair-bound individuals. Just getting my body out of the chair and onto the toilet seat in a stall and back again was torture. I cannot imagine how paralyzed individuals do this routinely in bathrooms that are not wheelchair-accessible. It is about as easy as trying to change a tire on a speeding car. 

In any event, I wound up finishing the front-page article but could not stand the pain anymore, when a co-worker called 9-1-1 at 2:50 p.m. Fifteen minutes later two large Philadelphia firefighters arrived, carried me down the stairs in a chair, transferring me to a stretcher (again, mind-numbing pain) and drove me to the Chestnut Hill Hospital Emergency Room at about 3:30 p.m.

I wouldn't say there was a long line of people waiting to be seen, but I think the man in front of me needed treatment for a musket wound. I lay on a gurney, my body bent like a pretzel, unable to move a muscle for what seemed like a month — actually, more than two-and-a-half hours. I begged a nurse for some pain medicine, but she said she was not allowed to give me any until X-rays were taken. 

I was finally taken to the X-ray department, where a technician told me he'd have to straighten out my leg in order to take X-rays. He proceeded to do so. I let out a scream that might have been heard in Wyndmoor.

"The bad news," said the radiologist about an hour later, "is that you broke your hip and pelvis. The good news is that it's your acetabulum that's broken, and that is the best place to break a pelvis."

I asked the doctor, "What's the worst place? New Jersey?"

I wound up at 7:30 p.m. in room 472 in the medical/surgical ward. I told the nurses I wanted a room with an ocean view or at the very least, a view of the Wissahickon Creek. I also wanted a sauna and a whirlpool but did not get them. I guess it's all whom you know.

When I was taken to my room in the hospital, I thought that watching TV might take my mind off the pain, but when I laughed at a sitcom scene, pain shot through the entire left side of my body. From then on I only watched sad shows like the 11 o'clock news.

I would be remiss if I did not mention that the staff at Chestnut Hill Hospital could not possibly have been friendlier. An almost non-stop phalanx of staff members came into each room to commiserate with patients. One nurse, Jean Bradley, who had a reputation as an angel of mercy, had been with Chestnut Hill Hospital for so long that she taught my wife at the now-defunct Chestnut Hill Hospital School of Nursing from 1961 to 1964, more than three decades before my accident.

After I was sent home, the home visit therapists from the hospital's home-care unit, Janice Arena and Lisa Eddy, could not have been more helpful in teaching me how to negotiate the crutches and teaching me exercises that definitely hastened my recovery. (The bill for two days in the hospital was more than $5,000, for which we fortunately had insurance.)

I did not have surgery since the doctors said these types of "clean" breaks eventually heal on their own. For the first few days at home, it was agony just to get out of the hospital bed in our living room to visit the commode five feet away. For two weeks I was confined to the first floor of our house and concluded that we definitely needed new wallpaper.

After that I was able to walk with a walker for a few weeks and then crutches for a few weeks and then a cane for a few weeks. It took about two months before I could go back to work and one-and-a-half more months before I could walk normally.

If there is one thing I learned from this painful ordeal, it is this: Whether you are walking or driving, slow down, especially in inclement weather. Rushing to save a minute or two may cause you weeks or months of pain and incapacity — or even worse.

Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com.