Quiz time!

OK, time to guess what you're looking at:



Here's a hint. You are looking at what happens when you combine winter camping, the onset of the flu, dehydration, and not eating enough with someone who has naturally low blood pressure and lives in an apartment with hard wood floors.

Give up? You're looking at sutures! In my face, specifically.



So the long and short of it is that I went winter camping right as I was getting what I think was some sort of flu. Bad way to start things off. I slept 18 hours Saturday night, and the better part of the day on Sunday. This meant that I didn't eat or drink much in that time. This eventually lead me to black out while I was in the bathroom late Sunday night. While blacked out, I decided to head back to my room, only I didn't realize that not getting enough oxygen to your brain hurts your ability to walk, and greatly helps your ability to fall down. So I hit the deck pretty hard, splitting open my eyebrow.



Never one to let something as trivial as low brain oxygen stop me from acting, I apparently got back up and headed back to the bathroom. At this point I was still largely blacked out, and also a bit punch drunk from the shot to the melon I had just taken, so my memory is a little hazy. I collapsed into the bathtub, which is where I came to.

Being that it was about 12:15 in the AM when I did this, the emergency room was the only place I could go to get stitched. Here's something I learned. ER people ask stupid questions. I walked into triage, expecting people to recognize instantly that, as a person with a ghostly-pale face, a decent sized laceration over my eye and blood smeared all over my face, I could easily be someone who had recently sustained a pretty hard shot to the head, and as such, would probably require medical attention.

Instead, the triage nurse looked at me and said:

"What can we help you with?"

What can we help you with? Are you serious? Is that what they teach you in emergency nursing school? I should have told her I wanted to order a pizza, or that I was there to see someone about an ingrown toenail, or that I just wanted to know if she thought that my pants made me look fat. What can we help you with, she says. Pfffft!

Apparently unsatisfied with only asking one stupid question, a few minutes later, she asks:

"Are you experiencing any head pain?"

What am I supposed to say to that? I don't want to be too much of a smart a-s-s to the people who are about to sew my face together, but how can they expect a serious answer to that question? So I said:

"Mostly it hurts where the hole is that doesn't belong there. -You know, the part that is bleeding? Right there hurts. Everywhere else is fine."

The other thing I learned is that things don't go speedily in the ER, which came as something of a surprise to me. You might think that on a tame night at the ER they could sew me up and send me on my way in about an hour or two. It was a tame night, so they should want to get me treated and out of their hair in case things got crazy on them, right? That's what I thought. I was there for over 5 hours.

I haven't received the bill. I'm bracing for that b/c I suspect I might be just a little outraged at what they charge for the whole ordeal. But I'll reserve my rage until I know it's warranted. I'll probably blog on that once I get it.

Anyway, all in all, I guess it's not too bad. A friend of mine had a similar black out a few months back, and he broke all of his front teeth when he fell face first into his bathroom floor, so I suppose my episode could have ended far worse. Plus it should be just big enough of a scar to be cool looking, but not so big that it will scare small children. Plus this is the first time I have ever had stitches as a result of an accident. So making it almost to 31 before having an accident that required stitches is a pretty good run of things, I think, so I can't complain.

So, yeah. That was my weekend. Hard one to top.