This Halloween, why not visit one of the spookiest places on Earth:
The Emergency Department…mwah hah ha…
The Emergency Room. Remember that ol’ thang? Gone are the days of the Emergency Room, replaced by what I suppose is the politically correct term “Emergency Department,” and functionally supplemented by Urgent Care centers.
While the ER is in theory supposed to treat people who have suffered physical trauma, surviving a visit to one can be a traumatic experience itself. Just this past week, I had to accompany a family member to one of these God-forsaken places, and had the joy of staying there for almost 24 hours. Let me tell you, I had truly forgotten how ----- -up these places can be.
Some say that humor is one way of dealing with trauma, and so to help fend off some ED PTSD, I figured I would recount all the ways I have found myself in the ER.
All the stupid, stupid ways…
If playing on a swingset hasn’t sent you to the hospital at least once in your life, I dare argue you may have had a deprived childhood. By that metric, it took me until the summer before 6th grade before I truly experienced childhood.
Raise your hand if it was the “Watch me flip backwards out of this swing but not stick the landing” that did you in.
*raises hand*
Yup, good ol’ adolescent hubris did yours truly in–I landed squarely on my little ass instead of my feet after one such back flip. SMACK! Right on the ol’ tailbone. Man, I could barely walk back into the house to let my mom know I had messed something up down below.
Of course she kindly hauled me to the ER, where I promptly1Just kidding. It was the ER–it took 2-3 hours to be attended to. had my developing gonads bombarded by X-rays, only to learn that I only thing I had really bruised was my ego.
Okay, so that was admittedly a milquetoast ER story. What say we turn the stupidity up a notch…
The weekend before finals week of my spring semester of college, me and my frenemy, “Spanky” Spankewich, decided to proactively blow off some steam with a round of mountain biking on some nearby trails.
It had been raining recently, and when I tried going down a 2-3 foot incline, my back tire decided it would slide sideways down the hill instead of following its brother in the front in an orderly manner. But instead of crashing and burning, I suavely laid my bike down sideways, and landed on my feet at the bottom of the hill.
“Hooray! Did you see that Spanky? I totally should have wrecked but didn’t!” I exclaimed, pumping my fist in the air victoriously.
“Uh…dude, why is your arm all red?”
“Wha!? Oh, crap, that’s blood.“
Turns out, there had been some random-ass broken beer bottle hanging out on the side of that hill, and I just happened to slide my right wrist perfectly over it as I was laying down my bike. And now I was spurtin’ my life force all over the place.
Yada yada ya, and I found myself getting sewn back together by some ER doc.
At first I was bummed by the incident, but then I found a silver lining: I was taking an Engineering Drafting course that semester, and part of our final consisted of manually drafting orthogonal views of some complicated geometric objects. This may not sound like much, but I despised such things, and was not looking forward to the final exam at all.
Needless to say, I was disappointed when I learned that having a sliced wrist on your dominant hand wasn’t a good enough excuse to get out of the exam.
Yeah, I may or may not have “accidentally” bled just a wee bit on my final drafts before turning them in…
When we lived in Springfield, Missouri, there was this big hill next to our school that led down to the soccer field, probably a good 8-10 feet high. One January when I was in 4th grade, Springfield got hit with a big freeze–cold enough to call off school, even if there was no snow.
Since we lived only a few blocks from the school, my bro, 1SkinnyJ, and I wandered over to try to go sledding on the frozen grass of that sweet, sweet high hill. Only problem was that we were a bit, uh, ‘cash-strapped’ and didn’t actually have sleds. So we improvised–there just happened to be a stack of old boards laying against the school, and we learned that they worked quite nicely.
Around my 6th or so trip down that hill, I took it a bit too steep, causing my board-sled to come to an abrupt stop at the bottom. My bottom, however, did not get the message and justg kept on going.
Now, this wouldn’t have been a problem, save for one l’il rusty nail that I had failed to notice hanging out in the board. As my body stayed in motion, sliding across the now-motionless board, that nail pierced my winterized jams and caught hold of some of my wobbly bits as they whizzed past.
You can imagine how the rest of this ER story goes: naturally ending in a tetanus shot–and the punchline you all just knew was coming:
“Doc, I think I just ripped myself a new butthole…”
As a kid, I was huge nerd. So huge, in fact, that one time in 4th grade I got so fed up with my classmates not shutting the ----- up while I was trying to work that I put in some ear plugs.
Fast-forward a few days later, and Mom was starting to get concerned about a notable dip in my awareness of my surroundings.
“Um, Honey, are you okay? Every time I ask you something when I’m standing to your right, you never respond.”
“Nope, I’m fine as far I know, Mom.”
“Maybe I should just take a peek in your right ear…”
*Peeps in my ear with flashlight*
“Holy sm*kes, son! Have you put anything in your ears lately?!?”
“Oh, yeah…the kids at school would not shut up while I was working, so I may have possibly chewed up some wads of paper and used them as ear plugs. Why do you ask?”
*digs in futility in my ear for good 15 minutes*
“Well, you’ve done it this time, Boy Genius. It looks like we’re headed to the ER…”
In my defense, the idea of paper-wad earplugs was a pretty logically sound2Unintentional pun! one at the time, but after having to actually say it out loud a second time–this time explaining the origins of this fiasco to the ER doc holding the incredibly long tweezers usually reserved for removing cockroaches from ears–I began to appreciate the alternate perspective that maybe–just maybe–I was a bigger dipwad than I fancied myself to be…
It’s almost every kid’s dream to be a pirate. But it takes someone truly special to make that dream come true. I, being someone truly special, was on the verge of making that dream a reality. I just didn’t see it coming…
‘Twas the morning my dad was supposed to come and pick me up and take me back to Kansas. Fifth grade was behind me, and nothing but a summer of fun stood between me and sixth grade. Like any other day, I started out with a nice little shower, followed by brushing of the teeth and hair.
Except…except when I went to brush my hair, I somehow managed to brush my right mother ----- eyeball instead. Like I said, it takes someone truly special, and hey, what can I say, I delivered on that one.
The downside was that even after the ER fixed me up, my eye was sore as…hey, what’s that one word that roughly rhymes with “up” and flows well after “as”? I can’t think of that word right now, but you get the idea.
On the brightside, hell yeah, I had that eye patch I had fantasized about having since I was five (I’m not lying–I have plenty of drawings I had made from that era as proof of what my “ideal self” looked like).
Later that afternoon, when my dad rolled up and took one look at me, he exclaimed, in his best anachronistic Hank Hill3From King of the Hill. impression:
“Wha–Bobby Junior, what in the hell did you do to yourself this time, boy?”
Missing him completely as I went in to greet him with a hug,4Because of my lack of depth perception, dummy. I reassured him:
“Livin’ the dream, Dad. I’m just livin’ the dream…”
(But hey, at least I’m not this guy…yet.)
Content created on: 23/24 October 2021 (Sat/Sun)
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