Tow #11: Patient by Rachel Reiderer

          One leg crushed under a tire, and the other wedged between the second tire and the cold, hard asphalt. And the bus that has mounted itself on top of you? Well, it's not moving. Rachel Reiderer has experienced this before, and wrote an essay on her time under the bus, and in the hospital. In her essay, called, "Patient", Reiderer uses personification and imagery to demonstrate to her audience that although things may be at the worst of times now, there is always a way to look toward the future.
          Reiderer uses personification multiple times throughout her essay, especially in reference to the different parts of her body that had been injured when she was caught under a bus. She writes, "My toes would have bent. My feet are pretty and obedient." (2) During the essay, Reiderer cannot bring herself to believe that the incident even occurred at all. Here, she states that her toes would have bent, even though, because of the accident, they could not. She then goes on to personify her feet, claiming that they are "obedient". In another part of the essay, she yells at her leg for hurting her. The audience can see that Reiderer is in extreme pain, and tends to take it out on her body or things besides herself. This is then resolved when she realizes that it is no one's fault that this has happened to her. Things just happen sometimes.
          In her essay, Reiderer also uses imagery. Although many of the images she provides are quite grotesque, they do give the reader a sense of the exact situation that she is in, and what she encounters on any given day when stuck in a hospital for almost a quarter of a year. She repeatedly describes her room as off-white wall-papered, giving a bland image for the eerie and lonesome hospital room in which she stays for so long. She gives in depth descriptions of how her leg looks and feels. She writes, "The skin is gone from most of the front and the side, and there is just a mess of red tissue about three inches across..." (6) This describes the brutality of what she deals with every day, and how she has to be positive in order to get through it.
        Reiderer is an extremely good writer, and this essay was, in my opinion, amazing. She used personification and imagery to especially emphasize her point that looking toward the future is imperative when in a situation like hers. Sitting in a hospital bed for nearly four months obviously isn't going to be easy, but she was patient.