A long, long, time ago, in a town about 10 miles away… I was dating this wonderful lady named Katy. And she had this storage building she was renting, when one day she had this idea that she would empty her storage building, and arrange her mom’s garage as a sort of hangout room. So she says to me, “Hey, let’s go check out my storage shed, and see what I have to bring back to the garage”.
Now silly man-brained me thought that meant we were going to the storage unit, and take a basic inventory to plan a plan of attack. Had I known, that her proposition was womanese for “Let’s load up my S-10, and fill up the garage today”, then I would have been better prepared for moving than shorts and flipflops. But that’s another story for another day.
WRONG, I’ll tell it now, we moved a couch and she shoved it right over the top of my feet and bent toe nails and scraped skin… but it’s okay, I loved her enough to forgive it.
So anyhow, we started moving things and found out that rats had made a nest in her couch… this was discovered in what caused me to look like a spaz swinging a baseball bat in circles trying to fight off a charging rat… IT WAS CHARGING ME, it’s crazy that an animal will charge something the size of a sky scraper with a hunk of wood swinging in it’s direction. So we dragged anything that could have rat nests in them to the dumpster. And started loading things into her truck, including a really old daybed with a trundle bed. So if you don’t know what a trundle bed is, as I did not at the time, it’s a bed that you can press down, and put under the day bed, and when you need more bed space, you pull it out, and it springs up and makes the day bed into a wider bed… like this…
You see? On some of these, you can pull that bottom bed out, and it will pop up and match the height of the other mattress it’s a really good idea if you’re one of those sick people that don’t just stuff all your crap under your bed to make it look like you’re not a hoarder or something.
So as we are loading the day bed she says to me… “You know, I don’t know why I’m saving that thing, it hasn’t worked in probably 25 years”. Now if I was an actor in a Lifetime movie, I would have seen this as the foreshadowing that it really was… although I’m dumb enough that I would have assumed that it meant when we got to her house she would have said “Ya know, let’s take that back to the dumpster, and waste our time and effort in moving it”. But things are never that simple when dealing with me.
I feel I must explain something about her garage, to let you fully understand what was going to happen that night. One of her ex-boyfriends (Not all of the people she dated were as classy as I, or as good of drivers as I) backed into the garage and bent the door EVER SO SLIGHTLY…. to where it wouldn’t open properly. HOWEVER, if you hit the door switch, then had three people, one on each end, and one in the middle, lift the door slowly and keep it on its tracks, you could get it to open. Sometimes, we would just open it halfway, and stoop under it, just because it was that much of a pain in the ass.
So this night, was a night we didn’t really feel like dealing with the garage door, until we got to the bed, and a few other things. The bed was standing upright leaning against the side of the bed of her truck, and once we had enough cleared for it, I said “Okay, I’ll get the daybed out”, and I leaned into the bed of the truck, grabbed onto the frame and pulled it towards the tailgate….
Then I woke up on the couch in her house, with her slapping my face saying “Don’t fall asleep, stay awake” and her roommate laughing and saying “YOU GOT KNOCKED THE FUCK OUT!!!” What the hell?
So as it was explained to me, as Katy was getting me mentally prepared to go to the emergency room, was that when I pulled on the frame of the bed, for THE FIRST TIME IN 25 YEARS, the trundle bed pop up frame decided to work! So with the magic of my touch, 25 years of rusted fury sprung forth and launched a steel bed leg into my head, right above my right eye. But being the super macho, testosterone fueled, manly tank of a man that I am… they said I did a sort of half spin, looked around and said “Let’s get this garage door open”, then worked on opening the door, got the bed frame in the garage and said “Man these lights are killing me, I gotta lay down my head hurts” and that’s when I woke up in the previous paragraph.
Katy drives me to the ER, and bless her for having to sit through all this, instead of just being a normal person and dropping me off and saying “I’m going home to sleep, chump, call me if they let you out”. But we sat in that waiting room for just over 8 hours. FINALLY they called me back to triage, and took my vitals, and put me in an exam room. WHERE I SAT FOR TWO MORE HOURS… by now, my headache was gone, and I felt pretty much normal, other than lights still being really bright to me. When suddenly the door opens… IT’S A DOCTOR!!! I check my watch, I’m timing how long he’s in here. He has me walk back and forth across the room, and then looks at me and says “You got your bell rung, wait here, and they’ll take you to discharge”. FORTY TWO SECONDS.
So I promptly get sent to discharge… THREE HOURS LATER. And they had me some paperwork and send me on my way. Poor Katy waited 11 hours and 42 seconds to take me back to her place, where I broke out the paperwork, and it was totally incomplete, it literally was a form letter they were supposed to fill out information on, and didn’t. So it read like “You have a concussion, you should stay awake for _________ hours before going to sleep, then rest for ________ days, and return to work on the _________ day”. Worth every cent of that $500 bill, let me tell ya. So the following day I went to the walk-in clinic by work to see if I needed to take time off, or what have you, and that doctor was feeling my head and says “You have a magnificent skull, a lot of people would have been killed by what happened to you… MAN you could headbutt the hell out of someone if you wanted”. So he gave me a few days off work, and some pain killers, which were just double dosage Aleve.
So I go back to work, at the time I was working in the Garden Center of Walmart. I get called to the toy department, to help get a bike from the second rack for a customer, and as I’m getting the bike down, the customer says “Hey, let me help” and he grabs the bike, and jams the freestyle foot peg RIGHT in the same spot that the daybed hit me… I got instantly dizzy, and the room went blindingly bright… I’ll be goddamned, he re-concussed me. THIS is why I don’t help people, it don’t lead to anything good. Well other than another week off from work!