Day Zero or How Things Can Change in the Blink of an Eye
Tuesday, March 8, 2005
That evening, I went out to do a normal task a task I had done many many times before. This was the task of letting in the last dog from the yard and turning off the heater in the garage. I have done this successfully dozens, no, hundreds of times..
That night was different. As I stepped out of the house and onto the garage steps, somehow I lost my balance. I tripped on the steps, tripped over my feet, tripped on the boxes of soda there, who knows. End result was that I went flying down the stairs. Headfirst into the garage door. Shoulder into the garage floor. And for good measure, knee into the garage floor. Convinced that this was a minor fall, I tried to get up and when I couldn’t, I yelled for Liz (who was not yet Nurse Liz).
Liz was a wee bit worried when she found me in a pool of blood in the garage. She helped me into the house and convinced me that the cut on my forehead needed to be stitched. A BandAid just wasn’t going to cut it. So off we went to the ER.
At the ER, they x-rayed my shoulder after stitching up my head and lo and behold, I had a fracture. Two actually. One fracture across the bottom of the head of the humerus and the other where I popped the greater tuberosity off the head of the humerus bone and it was sitting up on the top of my shoulder hanging out with my rotator cuff. The ER doc gave me a sling, painkillers, and a note to go see an orthopedic specialist the next day. We got home around 4:30am. It would probably have been later, but this rich Russian woman pitched a fit about the fact that her husband had been sitting there waiting for forever so they opened up the minor injury trauma unit for him and me.
Check out mckennl’s entry from March 9th for the funnier version of the events of the 8th.
That evening, I went out to do a normal task a task I had done many many times before. This was the task of letting in the last dog from the yard and turning off the heater in the garage. I have done this successfully dozens, no, hundreds of times..
That night was different. As I stepped out of the house and onto the garage steps, somehow I lost my balance. I tripped on the steps, tripped over my feet, tripped on the boxes of soda there, who knows. End result was that I went flying down the stairs. Headfirst into the garage door. Shoulder into the garage floor. And for good measure, knee into the garage floor. Convinced that this was a minor fall, I tried to get up and when I couldn’t, I yelled for Liz (who was not yet Nurse Liz).
Liz was a wee bit worried when she found me in a pool of blood in the garage. She helped me into the house and convinced me that the cut on my forehead needed to be stitched. A BandAid just wasn’t going to cut it. So off we went to the ER.
At the ER, they x-rayed my shoulder after stitching up my head and lo and behold, I had a fracture. Two actually. One fracture across the bottom of the head of the humerus and the other where I popped the greater tuberosity off the head of the humerus bone and it was sitting up on the top of my shoulder hanging out with my rotator cuff. The ER doc gave me a sling, painkillers, and a note to go see an orthopedic specialist the next day. We got home around 4:30am. It would probably have been later, but this rich Russian woman pitched a fit about the fact that her husband had been sitting there waiting for forever so they opened up the minor injury trauma unit for him and me.
Check out mckennl’s entry from March 9th for the funnier version of the events of the 8th.