Confessions of a Polluted Mindset – How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Hello all – I’m back from vacation with 15 stitches in my head and a horrible-looking black and blue that goes from my right hip to my knee. Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?

So last Friday I’m packing the car up for the two hour drive “down the shore. The vary last thing I’m bringing down is the luggage. I start to navigate the six steps from my laundry room down to the garage and somehow got my feet tangled up and I started to fall. Normally, I would have reached out for the banister or the garage door frame to keep me upright, but I had both hands full of luggage, the weight of which just accelerated my head-first fall down the steps. My split second thought was to just fall on top of the luggage. That was probably not a bad idea, but on the way down, my head struck the L-shaped bracket that holds the automatic garage door safety sensor. The resulting triangular shaped gash in my head unleashed a torrent of blood onto the garage floor.

I was a bit stunned at first, but managed to get up and make my way up to the kitchen sink where I grabbed some paper towels and called out to my wife,  She comes running down and reels in horror at what she sees. I assure her I’ve got the bleeding under control, but driving me to the emergency room is now on her to-do list. As we head down to the garage there’s a pool of blood on door mat to which my wife says, “my God, it looks like a crime scene!” Which it did, but likely having watched to many thriller movies. my wife’s first instinct was to destroy the evidence. She runs back and grabs paper towels and starts cleaning the mess. All while I’m standing there holding paper towels to my head waiting to go to the emergency room. Um, Honey, do you think you can worry about that later and get me to the hospital? 

Anyway, so she gets me to the emergency room where a Physician’s Assistant (PA) checks me out and says she’ll stitch it up, but first I should have a CAT scan. So we do that and sit there waiting for the results for about 90 minutes. When it finally comes, the test confirms that I do, in fact, have a brain (take that, haters!), and fortunately there’s no skull fracture or other serious damage – just a really nasty looking triangular hole in my scalp. The PA says she’ll be back to stitch me up. Naturally, it was a busy Friday afternoon on the in the emergency room, with the guy in the next room having broken his finger punching a wall, the woman two rooms down was suffering from extreme constipation and who knows what all the other people in the ER had done to themselves that day.

So thirty minutes later the PA returns and sets everything up that she’s going to need to stitch me up. She examines the wound more carefully and I hear a long “Hmmmmmmmmm,” which I knew immediately was not a good thing. She tells me it’s not a cut and dried (no pun intended) stitch job and she would feel better having a plastic surgeon look at it. The plastic surgeon is in his office 30 minutes away, so she takes some cell pics and sends them over to him. Another thirty minutes later, I’m told that he will have to do the stiches and will be on his way in an hour when his office closes. Ninety minutes later he walks in, puts in 17 stitches and goes on his way. The paper work comes a short time later and I’m finally out of there, six hours later.

We decided to stay home for the night and drive down the next day. The good news was I didn’t have to carry any luggage to the car since I’d already thrown it down there, and I was able to drive the two hours without any real issues. The bad news was that both the  PA and the Plastic Surgeon both told me I should avoid the sun, sand and surf – perfect for a beach vacation! Truth be told, I’m not really a beach guy anyway, so I didn’t have a problem staying back in our nice AirBNB as the de facto babysitter for my two youngest grandchildren while they took their daily naps at different times. I sat back, enjoyed reading my latest book (The Boys in the Boat) and explored various Spotify playlists. It was honestly the most consecutive relaxing I’ve done in a very long time, so the story does have a happy ending.

Sorry for the lack of anything Packers-related this week, but I purposely paid little attention to what was going on and as I suspected, there really isn’t much to talk about anyway. I promise to be back with some Packers content next week. 

Go Pack Go!