Dangers of the Internet

felicity at broadways photo by jodi
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

Yesterday, I hit my head again. Clearly, I am a total spazz who should wear a helmet 24/7. This time I did it at work, on an emergency exit sign of all embarrassing things and of course I managed to hit the exact same place where the cabinet of doom got me like a week ago. Now I have a dent in my head. It hurt like hell and so I made the terrible, terrible mistake of googling head injuries. Never do this. I knew better but in a moment of headachey madness I did it anyway and that's how I convinced myself that I had a concussion and was probably going to keel over and die at any minute. Never mind that I only had two of the danger signs - stiff neck and headache; I was conspicuously lacking the blurred vision, confusion (more than the usual confusion which is my natural state), passing out, throwing up (although I did feel sick, but even panicking I chalked that up to the roughly three pounds of crackers and cheese I ate at the staff meeting), sudden tiredness (I chalked that up to the mild hangover) and so on. Depressed heart rate. Unconsciousness (I wished.) Actually being dead. Stuff like that.

The thing with concussions is that you're not supposed to go to sleep. I remember this from when young M was small and hit his head on basically a daily basis. It got so he would whack his head and cry and I would launch directly into my concussion checklist. First, I would look at his pupils even though I could never remember if they were supposed to be dilated like he'd taken three hits of acid or tiny pinpricks or whirling around scarily like Charles Wallaces' when he's confronted with Evil on Kamazotz. Then I would quiz him on current events. "Who's the president?" I would say, "Mom!" he would wail, "I'm only five years old! How am I supposed to know that?" and I would know that he was okay. Then, much later, I would wake him up every few hours all night long, or, rather, until I gave that up and went to sleep myself. The website I looked at yesterday said that if you woke up confused and irritated, then you might have a concussion. I have to say that if I get woken up every two to three hours all night, I'm going to be confused and irritated, concussion or no concussion.

Last night I decided I couldn't go to sleep until 8 hours after I hit my head, which is to say, 10:00 or thereabouts. That wasn't really much of a sacrifice but I did try to milk all possible drama out of it. Unfortunately, M on the phone from SC was not totally impressed and just told me a gruesome story about how his grandfather died just exactly like that (except he was in a bad car accident first instead of whanging his head on an exit sign, so, yeah, not an exact analogy) and young M flat ignored me. So I knew there was no one who would wake me up every 2 or 3 hours and I prepared to just kick off. Ha ha, I thought morbidly, I wonder if the kids will fight over who inherits our 10 year old station wagon.

The fates watch out for me though, because I did get to wake up every 2 to 3 hours regardless. The dogs took care of the first wakeup - I've switched their kibble again, to something called Lassie, and it was a tragic error in judgment and the three dollars I saved were so not worth it. The dog farts rising from under the bed were so pungent, so awful, so amazingly thick, that it woke me up. There's not much you can do when dog farts wake you up, really. It's just one of those bad situations. And then, at around 4 in the morning young M got sick and came in to tell me that he had just thrown up and help, Mom, what should I do? Poor kid. Go back to bed, was all I could come up with, being as how the concussion was making me irritable and confused and also, you know, after you've thrown up there's not really much you can do except lie there and hope for a quick death. At least that's what I always do. And it's what I more or less did last night, given the concussion and the vomiting teenager and the dog farts.

But I'm still here and so is my headache, not to mention the irritability and confusion; still, I'm beginning to admit that I probably don't have a concussion. Which is a Good Thing. But now I have to do battle with the school, because young M has caught every single blessed virus that has ever been sneezed out on the Asheville High School campus and he's missed, basically, half his sophomore year. Yikes.