Last week, Tuesday night, I threw out my back reaching for a bottle of juice in the bottom of the fridge.
I couldn't sit, stand, or lie down. Worse, Mrs. Dual was at her part-time night-job, and I was home alone with my two sets of twin toddler-age girls. I had to crab-crawl up and down the stairs a few times for crying, nightmares, and give back dropped blankets and stuffed animals, probably doing yet more damage. So I sort of squat-crawled about the house until Mrs. Dual came home at 9:30. I insisted I just needed to rest, somehow get flat, and I could sleep it off.
When Mrs. Dual saw I could not lie on the bed other than by rolling onto it, and grabbing my knees to my chest and staying in that position, she demanded we go to the hospital. I gave in, we called a grandparent to come over to house-sit the sleeping girls, and we went to the E.R. Luckily it was a slow night, and I spent no time waiting (squatting?) in "chairs". Being polite, non-combative, middle-class, English-speaking non drug-seekers, I got some very friendly service from the RN and the attending.
I got some Vallium pills and a shot of (Dilauded?) and and a few good Rx's for the following days so I could lie flat and sleep. Which I did immediately after staggering into the house with Mrs. Dual assisting. The next morning Mrs. Dual called work for me, and let me sleep in and somehow managed to get all four of our toddler girls out of the house to YMCA day-camp without waking me.
When she got home Mrs. Dual woke me, saw I was still walking bent at a 90 degree angle, and suggested I take a hot shower to try and loosen my back up. Since standing bent over in a wet slippery confined space is not a very natural act, I eventually face planted into the side of the enamel/cast-iron bathtub. I tried to stop myself with my arms, but the sudden movment was like knives in my back, and my arms only moved enough to knock over all the soaps and shampoo bottles down with me.
And as I rolled out of the shower, Mrs. Dual noted that I had a knot on my head which looked, according her, like "I had a breast implant in my forehead." or "One of the rubber-butt forehead aliens out of Star-Trek".
Other than my head hurting, I thought I felt no worse, until lunch, when I threw up, and according to Mrs. Dual, got "goofy", so back to the E.R. we went. (hint) When you come in a wheelchair with a lump on your head the size of a lemon, a barf-bucket in your lap, and slurred speech, you get seen quickly... And apparently while we were in the ER bay, I alternately couldn't stay awake, didn't know the day, and kept forgetting what Mrs. Dual told me just a few minutes earlier.
I also got mad when I thought my EKG leads were a catheter, and then later was furious at Mrs. Dual because I thought we were all in a car accident and she should have been at Children's Hospital with our girls instead of me. Fortunately, other than the lump outside my skull, and the normal grey matter, (I'm suspicious that Mrs. Dual may have laid odds with one of the RN's it would be completely empty, but was in no condition to confirm it...) the CAT scan was clear, and after a few hours of observation while they finally let me sleep, I was discharged. Other than forgetting Mrs. Dual telling me to wait for her to come around and help me, and falling out of the car when we got home and skinning my knuckles and knee, I was better, if walking like a hunchback.
Unfortunately, instead of just turning my forehead colors, all the blood leaked into my eyes and started swelling them shut.
Here I am last night before both eyes went, holding my left eye open with some bandaids so I could watch TV. (Mrs. Dual thought the "Hello Kitty" one for the kids was cute, didn't tell me until after the picture was taken.)
(note, you can't even really see the lump at this point, as it evenly covers almost my whole forehead by now....)
Here they are Thursday, when I just gave up, and I started holding my eyes open with my fingers when I needed to shuffle about for bathroom runs.
Now I'm back at work. My eye-sockets are every color of the rainbow but at least I can see without propping my eyes open. But my eyeballs themselves are all bloodshot and yellow, making me look like an infected lab worker crawling out of a tunnel, and Mila Jojovich should be dispatching me John Woo-style with a pair of HK MP5-K's…
It's now official, I am the klutziest man on earth.
