Arriving home Friday feeling chipper, I decided to finish the lawn work that was interrupted the previous Sunday when I stepped onto my neighbor’s driveway to turn the mower around and was struck by his SUV backing swiftly down the shady, tree-covered blacktop.
To celebrate the start of Memorial Day Weekend, I set to work, and was done in about an hour.
Done in, it turned out, by my own unhinged optimism.
By dinner, my head felt as if a roller derby tournament was being played inside it. And the skaters kept whipping each other around my cranium for the entire weekend.
Meanwhile, all the aches and pains that had minded their manners for five days, suddenly began throwing tantrums. My bruised rib gave notice that there would be no peaceful sneezing or coughing allowed while it was feeling out of sorts. And with the pollen count high, it got to make its point pretty often.
Standing stock still kept the shock waves to a minimum, but I don’t have the self-control of those unnerving mimes who stand on pedestals at Caesar’s in Atlantic City, looking like alabaster emperors until you walk by them and they suddenly change position.
Lying down seemed the better option, except that it required a commitment. Once I was prone, the effort needed merely to roll over, let alone sit up, meant I would be wise to figure out everything I would possibly need for the next four hours and have it with me before I pulled the ripcord and fell to earth.
With my head now reverberating like a glockenspiel at a high school football game, I gathered up book, camera, cell phone, water, Tylenol, and towel, and flopped onto a lounge cushion tossed on the backyard grass. I read for awhile, but that only made my eyes bulge like a bullfrog’s.
Finally I picked up my camera to see what things looked like from ground level.
Here are three examples: my cell phone on the cushion; a leaf in the grass that looked like a brown praying mantis, and (taken flat on my back) the trees directly overhead.
By evening, my head was pounding like the Japanese taiko drummers who greeted Barack Obama that morning at Wesleyan, where he filled in for the ailing Ted Kennedy as commencement speaker.
My son, who’ll be a senior at Wes in the fall, drove up with a school chum to hear the possible next President speak. My son ended the day driving me back to the emergency room.
If you think the new Indiana Jones movie was doing big business, you should have seen the crowd waiting to get into the ER at UMDNJ in Newark. I waited three hours for a bed, then four hours for a CAT scan, then two hours for a talk with the doctor. Not only was every bed in every room occupied, but patients were sleeping in beds in the hallways. And most everybody was in worse shape than I was.
By sunrise, my tests had come back clean, and the CAT scan revealed that the concussion was "resolving," meaning that there was less blood loose in my skull than there had been a week earlier.
I was gently chided for getting back in the saddle so soon after the accident. I needed weeks of rest before working up a sweat. A lot of people get hit in the head, one doctor said, and don’t suffer any hairline fractures. My injury was serious, and I should take it easy.
Now wait a minute, I said. Last week they told me I had a "minor concussion." Now I’m hearing about weeks of rest, a hematoma, and caution caution caution. What happened to "minor"?
The doctor, who spends some of her time in UMDNJ’s Level One Trauma Center, where I was treated after the accident, said she suddenly had it figured out.
When they said "minor," they were speaking from their perspective. The trauma team gets such a steady diet of grisly gunshot wounds, "with brains spilling out," and stabbings and strokes and car crash victims, that a guy with a hairline fracture, a mild concussion and bumps and bruises is indeed "minor."
"Our perspective gets skewed," she said.
But if the calamity is in one’s own brain, it sure as heck isn’t minor, she added.
After our conversation (with its aperitif of two Percocet) I felt a lot better. Armed with a prescription for extra-strength Motrin, I returned to the dangerous suburbs, and by the end of the day felt well enough to make a new batch of rhubarb.