Emergency 911

On first guess, you'd think it would've been me, with my hanging upside down on a pole.  Or the kids, just being kids, falling from their bikes or not looking both ways before crossing the street.  But, it wasn't.  It was Craig.  If you don't know my husband, he can do absolutely everything and he does it well.  He can fix absolutely anything and he does that well too.  He's a man's man.  Like the Marlboro man.  Except he doesn't smoke.  Or wear a cowboy hat.  Well, occasionally he does.

So when I heard a loud thud Thursday morning, I ran outside to find him face down in the driveway with a pool of blood under his head, unconscious.  It was only a few posts ago I told you I'm not the person to have a heart attack in front of.  I should have added fall from a ladder on the roof.  My friend was just telling me that our feelings manifest into our reality it's The Secret of life. Fuck.  This is all my fault.  And now, all I can do is scream.

My neighbor heard the ladder and the screams confirmed his urgency. With him there, I could run in the house and grab the phone to call 911.  Then try to comfort Ember who hadn't left for school while my neighbor attended to Craig. Trying to be calm for her, was probably the best thing for both of us.   Another neighbor came and took Ember to school.  The firetrucks and the paramedics were there when I walked her down the driveway past her dad, to wait across the street for a neighbor to walk her the rest of the way to school.

My neighbor drove me to the hospital after the ambulance pulled away.  He tried to soften the mood and relax me with small talk.  But, I'm assaulted by thoughts of the worst, they are the only things that penetrate my overwhelmed mind.  Everything else lingers above me like a humid vapor.  The same damp heavy air we used to breathe in daily when we were newlyweds living in Miami.

When we get there, Craig's conscious, he's performed his own medical assessments, confirmed his balls are intact and thanked everyone profusely.  In fact he's on a loop from the concussion, doing this same check every minute on the minute.  He has a huge open gash down to the skull on his forehead where most of the impact was.  And a broken and deformed wrist at the joint where he took some of the pressure of his stage dive off the roof.  The CT confirms he has no bleeding in the brain.  He's going to be ok.  I can breathe again.

He'll spend the night in ICU to monitor his head trauma.  The rest of the day we spend waiting for the hand doctor to show up and tell us when surgery will be. Later today or tomorrow?  So we wait.  For hours.  We wait so long, I start to refer to the doc as "hand job" for entertainment purposes.  It's 2pm, and still, no hand job.  I leave to pick up the kids from school and bring them back to the hospital to see their Dad.  We leave when visiting hours are over.  Still, no hand job.

I return on Friday morning and they downgrade Craig from ICU to the floor.  The morning CT scan looks great.  But we're still waiting on our hand job.  We waited all freakin' day.  Finally, someone made the decision to discharge him late Friday afternoon and that we'd have to schedule an outpatient surgery directly with him.

Because hand job never came!  (Ok, seriously, how fucking funny is that?)  And now I'm questioning his hand job skills.

And on Monday when we meet him for the first time I'm going to try my best not to call him hand job to his face.  Although I can't make any guarantees.  I should at least wait until after Tuesday, when he'll be doing a hand job on Craig.  Surgery.  I'm talking surgery here people.