What hurts the most is explaining the dumb injury
After my youngest son had to visit the emergency room this week
when a bug bite swelled up and gave him a Popeye-like forearm for a
few hours, I realized that most of my trips to the hospital have
been for non-traditional injuries.
I was hoping that the triage nurse would ask me what happened to
my son and I’d get to say
”
he ate too much spinach,
”
but my wife wisely jumped in to give the real story about the
bug.
What hurts the most is explaining the dumb injury
After my youngest son had to visit the emergency room this week when a bug bite swelled up and gave him a Popeye-like forearm for a few hours, I realized that most of my trips to the hospital have been for non-traditional injuries.
I was hoping that the triage nurse would ask me what happened to my son and I’d get to say “he ate too much spinach,” but my wife wisely jumped in to give the real story about the bug.
During my sports-playing days, I had my share of ankle and finger sprains, which were perfectly normal reasons to visit Hazel Hawkins for an X-ray. I was injured in the heat of battle – well, maybe at practice – while competing for something.
It was much different during my sophomore year, when my friend and I were messing around with golf clubs in my parents’ living room (yes, whatever happened next was deserved). He swung the wooden driver in front of my face to see how close he could get and it caught me on the forehead.
The blood gushed out immediately and I calmly walked to my parents’ bedroom to ask if they’d take me to the hospital. Strangely, it didn’t hurt at all, even though the amount of blood made it look like I had been hit with an axe.
In the emergency room, I had to explain that my forehead was cut open because my friend had swung a golf club too close to my face.
“This guy was your friend?” they asked.
Yes, and he still is to this day, though I refuse to play golf with him because I don’t trust his swing. The injury is now the source of great joy for my yearbook students, whom I show the class picture of me with a forehead-sized bandage under my bangs as a reminder that yearbook pictures bring back memories forever.
While in college I had to visit the emergency room after a car accident – not my fault – to get stitches. It was another perfectly normal reason for a hospital visit.
Then I got married, settled back in Hollister, and figured I’d live a safe, serene life free of emergency room visits.
Then I got over-anxious with hedge trimmers and in addition to cutting some branches I cut the very tip of my thumb. The bleeding wouldn’t stop so I had to make a visit to the emergency room to explain that I hurt myself while trying to shape some bushes in my yard. It would have made more sense had it been an electric trimmer, which would seem more difficult to control than the hand shears with which I injured myself.
That was sort of embarrassing, but at least I was injured in the great outdoors while being a man; taming nature with a sharp landscaping tool.
My next visit to the X-ray room was the one I was most reluctant to make, as I thought I had broken my toe … while vacuuming.
Yes, it’s true. In the course of making nice, straight lines in my carpet while helping around the house, I ran over my own toe while vacuuming barefoot. I’ve stubbed my toes many times, which is a pain worse than being hit in the forehead with a golf club. The pain from the runaway vacuum injury was even worse.
It still wasn’t as bad as the pain of explaining to the X-ray technician that I was there to have my toe checked after it got run over by an Electrolux. Thankfully, it was not as bad as I had feared and I didn’t require a cast or any other such protective covering. That would have meant sharing the story over and over again, which would have been much more painful than the injury itself.
As a vacuum salesman would say, it would have sucked.
For the record, the new emergency room at Hazel Hawkins and the people that work there are really nice and we got in and out in record time: less than an hour. I hope I never have to go there again, because that means someone I care about has an injury. I especially hope that if I ever have to be treated there again, my injuries don’t involve a vacuum or a golf club.
The explanation for silly injuries is way more painful than the injuries themselves.
Adam Breen teaches newspaper and yearbook classes at San Benito High School and is a reporter for The Pinnacle. He is former editor of The Free Lance. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].
