The Day Jill Fell Down and Broke Her Crown: On the Best Laid Plans of Mowers and Munchers

At the risk of sounding like I’m channeling Rod Serling…Imagine, if you will, the following scenario:  A respectably fit “woman of a certain age” returns home from church on a beautiful Sunday morning in August.  She walks the dog, changes into work clothes, and heads outside to mow the lawn before lunch.  She makes a dozen passes over the rough back yard terrain, then stops to empty the clippings from the mower-mounted collection bag into a large, molded plastic yard waste container with its hinged lid already open to receive deposits. 

As she wheels the 90 gallon cart toward the gentle slope leading to the spot where the mower sits, something goes horribly, freakishly wrong.  Her hands resting on the hinged edge of the open bin, she nudges it forward.  Then, in a flash of lost control, the slant of the hill pulls everything off balance:  The bin is ripped out of her grasp as it falls flat on its back, splaying out the hinged lid and inserting it under her right, forward-marching foot, which pins the bin in place, bringing it to a sudden stop and hurtling her forward at whiplash speed.  Her head whacks with incredible force into the far rim of the open bin. 

The perfect storm of body weight, momentum, and gravity work together to impose lethal power on even that rounded plastic edge, as it peels a five inch swath of flesh away from the underlying skull. 

——-

So there I stood, or rather sprawled.  My reflexive instinct was to raise my hand to my head and measure the damage.  I wish I hadn’t.  To my inexperienced touch, the two ridges of flesh separated by my fall left a divot so deep that I was absolutely certain what I was feeling was a dent in the skull itself.  “Dear God, dear God, dear God,” I heard a voice ringing out from somewhere.  As it turns out, it was my own, but if ever I could aptly apply the overused expression “surreal” to personal experience, this would have been the moment.  Talk about spontaneous prayer. 

Crazy things flash though your head – no pun intended – when you are propelled by terror through the back door into your own kitchen, gushing the enormous amounts of blood that a scalp injury can produce.  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I scolded myself aloud.  “Now I’ve done it,” I thought.  “A dent in my skull.  How are they gonna’ fix that?  And will I live to see them attempt the repair?”  Images of prominent people who’ve succumbed to head trauma whirled through my brain like a newsreel on hyper-speed as I simultaneously bemoaned having messed up the day’s itinerary:  tidy up the yard before toddling off to Taco Bell for our ritual summer-Sunday midday meal with my husband, whose name really is Jack, then run our weekly errands. 

I am not hysterical by nature.  This was probably as close to that state as I have ever been.  But I managed to stay collected enough to hold my hemorrhaging pate under cold running water from the kitchen tap, my poor husband not knowing whether to grab his car keys or the smelling salts.  His first sight of me had been as I stood in the middle of the tiled floor, Lady McBeth-like, my hands dripping with blood and screaming that I needed him, now.  By the time he got to my side, my heart was pounding so dramatically that I had trouble explaining what had happened.  Heck; it took me three opening paragraphs to try to put it into words here, twenty-four hours after-the-fact. 

And Jack Came Trodding Calmly After 

Once he has determined that this is not a pet-involved tragedy, level-headed spouse gathers cold wet compresses for the patient to press against the injury, and off we go in the little green Saturn, with its bad muffler announcing our urgency all the way to the emergency room entrance – a blessedly mere two-mile trip.  I have the shakes.  I look at my free hand and see no tremor, so the sensation must be entirely visceral.  “They’re going to have to shave my head,” I whine, finally convinced that I am not, in fact, going to die on the spot. 

Surely all this blood will get me to the front of the line, I tell myself as I trudge toward the swooshing automatic door, but the waiting room at Emergency is completely empty.  Aside from a testy Front Desk clerk who insists that my employed husband must actually be unemployed because, “That’s what the internet says,” everyone is wonderful.  The triage nurses are gentle, comforting, and calm.  They remove the two layers of blood-soaked washcloths and re-wrap my head with the high tech equivalent of vinegar and brown paper; reassure me that head-shaving will probably not occur, since often staples can be used to close the scalp; ask about prescription medications and if I am abused at home.  “Absolutely not,” I say; “Only by me,” I think. 

Ushered efficiently into an exam room, I haul my Jack in with me, and prepare for a lost afternoon.  After all, this is where the tedious wait usually begins in earnest.  But a nurse soon appears, asking, “How are you?”  “Dumb,” I respond.  She sweetly assures me that if anything could have been done to avoid the accident, I would have done it; that these things happen, and are not the fault of the victim.  I soak up her kind reassurance like the thirsty, quivering sponge I seem to be at the moment, but I question, in my heart, the veracity of her words.   “What if I had just…”