I have mentioned before that as a child (ok, as an adult too) I was INCREDIBLY clumsy. I spent enormous amounts of time in the emergency room. So much so that social services was called on more than one occasion because the e/r docs could not believe that one child could inflict so much damage on themselves–they thought my parents were abusing me. They’d send my parents out of the room and say things like, “It’s ok…you can tell us what really happened. We promise you won’t get in trouble…” etc.
Anyhoo, one time when I was about 8, we were playing hide and seek and I was running to my hiding spot when I tripped on my shoelace and fell head first into the front step of the neighbors house. I hit my right temple exactly on the corner of the step and was out cold. Got a concussion and a nasty black eye and yet another trip to the e/r. That time, the social worker asked me what happened and I said, “I tripped on my shoelace.” And naturally she assumed that nobody could be so much of a moron as to actually knock themselves out with a simple untied shoelace. I finally conviced her that, yes, I WAS that stupid and they let me go home with my parents.
First time, I was little, I don’t know the exact age. I’m guessing 3 years old. I was just short enough to run under the mail boxes on our cul-de-sac without bumping my head on the bottom. So my friend (9 months younger and short for her age anyway) and I for some unknown reason thought it would be fun to run as fast as we could under the mailboxes. When we got to her house, their mailbox had this metal scroll things. WHAM! My first black eye and the first time I blacked out. (I think about that now and the neighborhood kids could have killed me. They yanked me off of the ground and carried me home. I could have broken my neck. Oh, well, I was fine.)
The second time, we were on a field trip, my preschool class and I. We had finished with our tour of the fire station and were having a picnic in the park. I was playing on the monkey bars. This was one of those shaped like 2 arches crossing each other. Somehow, I got myself hanging by my hands and ankles from the top of the arch. Then I thought how cool it would feel to hang by just my ankles. So I woke up in a pool of my own blood. My first bloody nose, double black eyes, and second time to be knocked out.
The third time I was 11, my neighbor (the same one with the scroll work mailbox) had just laid a cement block in sand walkway to their front door a few months before. The blocks had started to settle a little unevenly. I was just walking along happy as can be. Then I tripped in such a way on the corner of one of the blocks that I went straight down without getting my arms out or anything. Just straight down like a board falling. I saw the ground coming up to meet me. I woke up when my friend’s mom came to see what the thud was with the edge of the porch under my forehead. My face in a depression where the blocks had settled. No bloody nose that time and the black eyes weren’t very bad, hardly noticable.
The fourth time I was 16, I was playing catch with one of the neighborhood boys. Now, as much as I adore watching baseball, I am the WORST person I have ever known at playing baseball. This guy had an amazing arm. (We all thought he’d go on to be a famous baseball player.) So since we were only playing in our little cul-de-sac and also I think to give me more time to catch the ball he was throwing it very high in the air. Well, on one throw I got under it and I put the glove over my head. The last thing I heard was him yelling something like, “DON’T DO THAT!” Safety tip for clumsy people like me: <b>Don’t try to catch a ball directly over your head. If you miss, it hits your head.</b> That didn’t really knock me completely out. I don’t think I laid all the way down in the street. It knocked me on my butt though and everything got all blurry and floopy. It was like my friend was speaking a different language for a few seconds, even though he was still speaking English, he says.
But as you can tell, none of this has effected my in the least.
I had this friend who did, see…it certainly wasn’t me…it was this…er…um…friend. Yeah, a friend.
This friend of mine was playing volleyball. Someone served long. Someone served very long at a very fast clip. My friend ran after the ball. After running through a length of lawn about that of the volleyball court, there was road. There was a kid on a bicycle on the road. There was a mentally impaired kid on a bicycle on the road who had been slowly pedalling around the same circle for hours. There was a mentally impaired kid who didn’t respond to my friend running directly at him. My friend realized that the kid wasn’t going to stop. My barefoot friend decided that rather than lose his toes in the spokes of the bicycle, he should jump over the kid on the bicycle. My friend almost cleared the kid–he caught his feet on the kid’s helmet. The additional force accelerated my friend head directly toward the ground. My friend did the ol’ faceplant. I, um, I mean my friend was quite thoroughly knocked out for a few minutes. He was aware of what was occuring around him, but unable to control his body in any way. Boy, my friend sure was a sucker.
I was 12 years old and riding my bike along on a rather windy sidewalk. There were little landscaped hills of grass around most of it, but one part ran right by a dense hedge on the right. I was so cool I was riding ‘no hands’ and didn’t notice I was a little too close to the hedge. Next thing I knew I was lying on one of the little grassy parts; I rolled over and saw my bike, still perfectly standing up, the right handlebar stuck in the hedge. It was quite a bit of luck that I’d flipped over and landed on the softer grass rather than the concrete sidewalk. I don’t know how long I was out but it was probably a few minutes. Unfortunately, I don’t think anybody saw it – too bad, it would probably have been pretty funny.
The first time I even knocked myself out, I was at my grandma’s farm. She had a porch swing hanging from a length of steel tubing that was braced between a tree limb and a sturdy trellis. At age 5, I thought it would be the coolest thing EVER if I swung from side to side on the swing rather than back and forth. Result: steel tubing becomes dislodged from tree limb, swing collapses, Junie gets knocked out cold by falling piece of steel. My parents were so worried about the goose egg on my head that no one realized that the tubing had bounced off of my head and onto my foot until the doctor discovered my broken foot two weeks later!
Knockout #2: Flash forward to the high school Homecoming Parade. It’s my senior year, and I’m marching along with the senior float taking pictures of the parade and the crowd for the school newspaper. I ran to catch up with some kind of cute shot (I don’t even remember what it was) I tripped over my own feet and started falling to the street. In the “oh my god I’m falling” slow motion moments that followed, I realized that if I broke the camera I was carrying, I would be out several hundred dollars. Result: Junie manages to turn as she falls, saving the camera but striking the back of her head on the pavement and going down for the count in front of most of the town.
Knockout #3: It’s my freshman year of college. I’m sleeping in a loft bed when the phone rings. Result: Junie sits straight up in bed, banging forehead on the ceiling, knocking herself unconcious and falling right back onto the pillow again. The phone was never answered.
Next week on Head Injury Theater…I tell you about the Swinging Door Incident.
Sunshine, I had the same type of childhood - not to the point where the authorities suspected child abuse, but certainly to the point where I knew my way around the emergency room better than some of the doctors.
In this particular incident, I was about 12 or 13 years old, and it’s a damn good thing I didn’t actually get knocked out, or I’d probably be dead. It does show a great deal of stupidity and lack of foresight on my part, though, and that’s all that counts, right?
I was visiting with a friend who lived in a housing complex. In the center of the complex was a rec building with an indoor pool. My friend had gone home but I was still at the pool when another girl came along and the 2 of us started playing together. I have always been a really good swimmer and a real water baby - it’s my element for sure. Anyway, this girl decided we should race. I was stoked! NO ONE could beat me in a swimming race. No way.
I swam underwater as fast as I possibly could, arms and legs pumping as I raced to the opposite side of the pool, where I promptly smacked my head into the cement wall and went down like a stone.
I don’t think I went unconscious (like I said, I’d be dead if I did) but I was in shock for the rest of the day. I staggered dazedly out of the pool and back to my friend’s place, blood gushing from FOUR vertically aligned wounds on my head: my forehead, the bridge of my nose, above my lips, and my chin. Once I got there (and what a sight I must have been!) I insisted that I was just fine, and would everyone PLEASE leave me alone and let me sleep. It was about 2 in the afternoon.
Here’s my recipe for a sure-fire knockout: Ingredients:
1-idiot
1-bathroom, tile floor and walls
1-long hallway
1-pair knitted houseshoes, compliments of Grandma
1-running start
Directions:
Take bathroom and mount securely to house. Allow tile walls to firm for about 10 years. Place long hallway from bathroom door to front of house. Insert one foot from idiot into each knit houseshoe. Add liberal amount of running start to idiot until momentum is built to heavy froth.
Once all ingredients are in place, suddenly attempt to halt idiot’s momentum (Note: tile floor and knit houseshoes will initially impede this process). Ingredients will mix themselves from this point forward (tile wall will ensure this).
Yield
Enough out cold idiot to satisfy any family and some small communities.
Serving Suggestions
Can be served directly from bathtub into which idiot fell, unconcious.
When I was a freshman in college, I was horsing around with a friend on the porch of my dorm, when my head hit the very sharp, very hard brick edge of the door frame. I was really dizzy and I had a killer bump on my head. My friend (well, not anymore) thought I was a major baby when I told him I needed to go lie down–I should have gone to the infirmary–a put a cold washcloth on my head. He went off to find someone more fun to play with.
The next day, I decide–hey, wouldn’t it be fun to go to Sears? So being that I am in Greensboro, NC with no real mass transit system and no car, I walk there. It’s only 45 minutes each way. I do that all the time at home (NYC). Yeah, but not usually with a mild concussion. Brilliant as I am, when I arrive, I’m weaving around, feeling sick and dizzy, so I decide to go back to school–and I walk! What an idiot!
The only good thing was that I got out of doing one of those “bonding” things that freshmen do, this one involving a ropes course, dozens of feet above the ground. Not a good thing to do with a concussion.
One summer night when I was about 15 or so, I had the urge for some TaterTots. I went to the freezer and got the bag, and walked towards the stove. At that moment a fly buzzed me, so I swatted at it.
With the hand I had the bag of TaterTots in.
Which caused the bag of TaterTots to connect at full speed with my crotch.
It didn’t quite knock me unconscious, which was a great pity.