Doll Hospital
When I was a teenager, I got dropped on my head by my skating partner. The wail of the siren was muffled from inside the ambulance. Paramedics pelted me with questions I may or may not have answered correctly. My body and my brain were still in shock. My feet were bare, other than a thin pair of tights; someone had removed my skates. I wiggled my toes to make sure I still could. I blinked my eyes, looking up at the medical instruments connected to the vehicle’s walls with spiraled rubber cords. They bounced with every bump.
**
When I was eight months old, long before my feet ever touched the ice, I received a doll as a Christmas gift from a family friend. When I could speak, I named the baby “Babe”. She was so well-loved, she was practically flattened by all of my attention.
When I was six, my mother said we could go “get her fixed up real nice”. We took her to the doll hospital for what would be a full torso transplant: her head, her arms, and her legs were intact, but all of her soft parts in the middle needed to be re-stuffed.
In that case, our car was the ambulance. We pulled up to a brick house with a red cross out front. “You stay here,” my mother said, I suppose because she didn’t want me to clock that it wasn’t actually a hospital, but someone’s house. She ran up the porch steps happily, and deposited Babe into the arms of an elderly woman. Babe returned home after a week, all fixed. She was still smiling, and her eyes still blinked whenever I tilted her, ever so gently. I put her little knitted socks on her feet and continued to love her more.
**
At the hospital, which was an actual hospital, my mother rushed to the side of the stretcher as they rolled me through the Emergency Room doors. My partner, who had been apologizing between whimpers, receded. Like Babe, I didn’t feel anything. Yet. Unlike Babe, my head was not intact, nor was my face.
The doctor was not a nice old lady. He was curt and bored as he explained that the gash on my forehead had to be sewn up. X-rays revealed that I also had a broken collarbone: it was cracked and slightly displaced so that the two halves no longer made a straight line. I had no soft parts. Just bones and muscles, taut from all those hours of training.
I returned home within the day, not recovered, not fixed, not smiling. It turned out that my collarbone was connected to everything: my ribcage, my shoulder blades, my lungs, my heart. I moved gingerly, following each shallow inhale with a more shallow exhale. It was painful to talk and even painful to breathe.
My mother couldn’t hug me, I was too broken. Or: I wouldn’t let her. I flattened myself on the couch, resentfully. I half-watched MTV while thinking about how much I hated my body, the frailty of it, how I hated bodies in general, how we (or some of us) had to use them for rigorous, dangerous, frivolous pursuits that, if you didn’t get injured, were supposed to get you to the top of a podium or, as my mother contended, at least get you into a good college. Babe was upstairs in the bottom drawer of my dresser where she’d been tucked safely for years. Someone, possibly my partner or possibly someone else, dropped off my skates at the house. But nobody could make me lace them up again.
The next day, my mother helped lower me down onto our bathroom floor, at the foot of the shower stall, so she could rinse the dried blood out of my hair. Bits of black circled the drain and turned the water a dark rust color before disappearing. She helped me stand back up again. Gently.
It hurt too much for me to cry. Besides, I was lucky to skate. To have that opportunity and her constant encouragement. I was so well-loved.
Jocelyn Jane Cox’s award-winning book, Motion Dazzle: A Memoir of Motherhood, Loss, and Skating on Thin Ice (Vine Leaves Press, 2025) explores motherhood, sports participation, and caregiving. She competed in the U.S. Figure Skating Championships four times and coached the sport for over two decades. Among other publications, her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Slate, The Offing, Skating Magazine, The Linden Review, Cleaver, Litro Magazine, and Colorado Review. Her fiction and nonfiction have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. More information at www.jocelynjanecox.com and on her Instagram @jocelynjanecoxwriter.