Hemorrhages involving my head were kind of a secret fear of mine when I was growing up, and my recent stroke got me to thinking about previous bleeds on or about the head.
There were, of course, those bleeds caused by using my face to stop a fall, and those that were the result of losing baby teeth or getting permanent teeth, but I didn’t consider them proper head bleeds. The ones I’m talking about were the ones in or near what I rather pompously, and some say erroneously, call my brain.
There were at least two incidents when I was a toddler that caused my parents a few sleepless nights. One was when I fell in a post office and fractured the bone behind my right ear. The other was when I fell off the stairs at my aunt’s and used the right side of my forehead to break my fall. I don’t, however, remember either incident. What I do remember is the car accident in Wyoming.
I was fourteen, and the family was taking a long vacation trip back to our original stomping ground in Oregon and Idaho. It was 1961, and the freeway system still hadn’t reached areas like rural Wyoming. We were driving along a two-lane road somewhere near Wheatland. My brother was drowsing on his side of the back seat, and I was reading. I heard my dad yell and tires screech, and a minute or two later I woke up on the floor.
We had been hit head-on when a young lady coming toward us blacked out. In our car there were metal handgrips strategically placed on the back of the front seat. A lot of planning must have gone into the placement of those handgrips, because they seemed to be placed to do the maximum amount of damage to anyone in the backseat during a crash. My brother busted up his upper arm pretty badly on his handgrip, and I slammed into mine with the top of my head.
Nobody, including me, thought I had more than minor injuries, so my parents decided I would stay with Dad, and Mom would go with my brother to the children’s hospital in Cheyenne, about 70 miles away.
And the Swelling Begins
That afternoon Dad met with the girl’s family’s lawyer (he was Judge Roy Bean’s grandson or great-grandson or something like that) to start taking care of all the things that crop up when your car has been destroyed on vacation. Finally, we got a room in a hotel and went to bed.
The next morning I woke up with a screaming headache. When I combed my hair, the head in the mirror was twice the size of the one I remembered from the day before. Then my father came in. When my dad saw me, he said a word most often heard on Emmy award-winning HBO dramas. To the best of my knowledge it was the second, and last, time he used that particular word during my lifetime. Since he had been the angriest I ever saw him the first time, I decided things were a bit more serious than a bad headache and a goofy-looking head.
Dad made Judge Bean’s grandson (I’m not sure about how “great” he was) do some paperwork a bit more quickly than he had planned, and by 10 that morning we were on our way to Cheyenne in our brand new third-hand Plymouth. When we got to Cheyenne we had a late lunch with Mom, and then they checked me into the hospital.
My brother, Merton, and I were in the hospital for three weeks. When you got past the Cheyenne Children’s Hospital being about 40 or 50 years newer than our usual hospital, it was just another trip. I remember there was a stack of comic books about 18 inches tall in the TV lounge. I remember that there was a TV lounge and that for the first day or so the staff made my ice packs so heavy they caused the bleeding to spread to the one or two parts of my head that weren’t swollen. Otherwise, as usual, I remember nothing. Well, almost nothing.
On the day we were discharged I remember I stood at the sink looking in the mirror and wondering if I could wear a sack over my head for the rest of the trip. I looked like a deranged raccoon. Not only was the area around both eyes a livid purple that was really almost black, the whites of my eyes were a deep, intense blood red.
Watch Out, James Dean
Now, being seen that way by the nurses and such was one thing. Like nuns, great-aunts, mothers and most teachers, nurses were “women” by definition, but it would be a few years before I would think of them as women. (Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.) But looking like that in public where I might be seen by, and more importantly perhaps meet, real female-type people was quite another. There was just no way I could go anywhere looking like a very skinny panda bear.
It was my mother who figured out what the problem was, but she just said to come with her and to stop whining. We went to a nearby drugstore where we bought three pairs of the biggest sunglasses we could find. I spent the next three weeks or so doing my best James Dean impression. According to a young woman I met in Oregon (a cousin), it fooled no one.
Read more Guy Boss at the Missing Factor.