COLUMN: In a pickle

I found that it first showed up in 1611 in Shakespeare’s play, “The Tempest.” And it meant to be drunk. When Alonso asked Trinculo, “How camest thou in this pickle?”, Trinculo answered, “I have been in such a pickle since I saw you last.” And Alonso said, “And Trinculo is reeling ripe: where should they find this grand liquor that hath gilded ‘em?”

In 1660, Samuel Pepys wrote “At home with the workmen all afternoon, our house being in a most sad pickle.”

So this saying is more than 400 years old. Now, along with “in a pickle”, we might hear “Between a rock and a hard place,” “In a jam,” “In a tight spot” and “in hot water.”

Which is where this woman was. Instead of between a rock and a hard place, she was on the tile floor of her kitchen , between her overturned wheelchair and a cabinet door, but instead of in hot water, she was half-lying in a pool of pickle juice and glass shards.

What had happened, she explained, was that she had been watching the evening news and eating a sandwich. She thought some pickles would make the sandwich tastier so she pushed her wheelchair into the kitchen, got a pickle jar out of the fridge and headed for the counter a short distance across the room.

But somehow the pickle jar fell to the floor, breaking, her wheelchair fell onto one side and she was wedged in between the cabinet and the chair. She was literally in a pickle. Fortunately, her phone had been on the chair seat and she called a son who lived nearby and he was there in a few minutes. But he could not get her up either so they called for a hospital ambulance.

When they arrived, the attendants were meticulous in assessing the situation, and kind and gentle. She was able to make a joke about being in a pickle and asked if they liked pickles because the room and the woman were reeking with the vinegary odor. Three said, yes, they liked pickles while one, standing back, admitted he did not.

In the emergency room, she apologized for smelling so strongly of pickles but one of the nurses assured her they had smelled much worse.

After tests and X-rays, the doctor on duty reported nothing was broken and that her pain in the upper chest from armpit to armpit was from the sudden stretching of muscles and tendons and would take a long time to heal. A second son who had arrived waited for prescriptions for medication and lidocaine pads while a gentle attendant carefully lifted her, moaning with pain, from the ER wheelchair into her son’s car seat.

After four weeks, many pain pills and heating pads (but no loss of appetite) later, she reported improvement enough to finally confront her computer. And to understand fully what the old saying “in a pickle” meant.

Mary McClure lives in Lawton and writes a weekly column for The Lawton Constitution.