There are many ways to celebrate a birthday---cake, a party, nice dinner out, having family and friends come over---and then there is my husband's way.
This past Sunday was Herbie's birthday and he wanted to spend it at our cabin in the mountains with my youngest daughter and me. We drove up on Friday with plans to spend Saturday and Sunday hiking through the woods and paddling around in canoes, then have a yummy dinner, a cake, and presents on Sunday afternoon before driving back home. A nice relaxing, outdoorsy weekend, right?
But Saturday morning my husband woke up before M and I did and since Herbie can't sit still for more than a minute, he headed out to the woods for some manly brush-hogging. The property that we own was left to us by Herbie's uncle and it consists of 127 acres. Herbie likes to use the tractor to cut trails for family and guests to walk through the woods.
I got up and had my coffee and M had just come downstairs when I heard a squawk on the walkie-talkie that was sitting on the kitchen counter. I answered it, figuring it was Herbie calling to see if we were up and ready for some fun. It was Herbie and he said, "I got the tractor stuck in the swamp." I replied, "You wouldn't be Herbie if you hadn't," since getting things stuck in mud is a common occurrence for my husband. Then he said, "I tried to pull it out with a winch. It snapped and the metal hook hit me in the back of the head. I'm bleeding and I need you to come get me." Who needs coffee to get your heart pumping when you have news like this?
He gave me directions as to where to find him and M and I jumped on the four-wheeler and took off, our two little white dogs following on foot since we didn't want to take the time to chase them down and stick them in the house. M and I drove back along an old logging road until I could see him coming up a trail to meet us. I jumped off and ran down the trail (and I don't run often) to where he was, but long before I reached him, I could see massive quantities of blood on his shirt and neck. We got him on the back of the four-wheeler and took him back to the cabin. While I assessed the situation, M drove back and picked up the weary dogs on the four-wheeler and brought them inside.
It was obvious that we were going to be making a trip to the emergency room of the local hospital. Problem is, the local hospital is an hour away. There are small clinics that are closer, but for a real hospital, you need to drive for an hour. Herbie jumped in the shower for a quick rinse off because he said he would be miserable riding in the truck and then sitting in the waiting room covered in sweat and blood. I told him to leave the bloody (not like Ron Weasley bloody, but actually bloody) clothes on so they would take him back to see the doctor more quickly, but he ignored my sage advice.
When he finished showering, I took my first good look at the damage and saw a two inch gash near the top of his head. He kept pointing to a spot lower on his head and when I parted the hair, I saw another gash there as well. M and I put several sterile gauze pads over the injury and then wrapped an Ace bandage around his head to hold them in place.
Herbie was pretty quiet on the ride, only answering my questions (Dizzy? Nauseated? Blurry vision? Any loss of consciousness? Was he knocked to the ground? That's right, I know these things. I raised four kids). I asked about pain and he said it wasn't too bad. I tried to get him to the hospital as fast as possible, but the drive involved a half hour on winding country roads before we reached the highway and both Herbie and M get carsick easily, so I drove just fast enough to imply a sense of urgency, but not fast enough to induce vomiting. It was a tricky balance.
Once at the hospital, he was evaluated. That is the nice thing about country hospitals--if I walked into a hospital at home and said I got hit in the head by a snapped winch cable while pulling my tractor out of the swamp, they would direct me to the psychiatric ward for further evaluation, but up there, they nodded their heads and the male intern said, "Yup, the same thing happened to my dad a few years ago." After looking at the cuts, they put fresh gauze on it and re-wrapped the Ace bandage around his head. They asked the same questions I had already asked him, and I was feeling smugly smart about that until I accidentally answered one of the questions by referring to his injury as his boo-boo.
They asked him what his pain level was and he said a three, which isn't too bad considering. Then they decided to put a neck brace on him "just in case" and that's when the fun began for real. If most husbands are potato heads, mine is a coconut head. There is no polite way to say this--his head is huge. It is perfectly proportioned to the rest of him, but compared to other heads, it's gigantic. He had to have a specially ordered helmet when he played high school football and he can never find a baseball cap that fits. He passed this huge noggin on to our girls so you can imagine how delightful it was to give birth to them. Not one had a pointy head, all hard and perfectly round at birth.
I think the hook on the winch cable would have missed a normal man's head by a mile, but Herbie presented too big of a target to miss. So the neck brace was waaaaay too small. They put it on anyway. Now the pain and discomfort level shot up to about a six, because the collar was tight on his throat and he had to hold his head at an odd angle to keep the back of the collar from digging into the lower cut. Blood started to pour down the back of his neck and I had to stuff tissues in there to sop it up. The collar was put on in case of whiplash, but Herbie hadn't had any neck pain before the collar was put on, only after from straining to hold his boo-boo (that's right, I said it) away from the hard plastic.
We walked from the waiting room back into the triage area and asked for it to be loosened. They did, but it didn't help much. When they weren't looking, I loosened it even more because the blood was still pouring out and Herbie had gone from mildly uncomfortable to downright miserable. Maybe twenty minutes later, they took us to an examining room and we told the nurse that the collar was a problem. She said she couldn't take it off until the doctor had examined him. After another half hour of sitting there with dripping blood and cranky husband, I took it off myself. Herbie was much happier and when the doctor finally came in, she didn't even mention it, so I wasted twenty minutes mentally plotting how I would defend my actions when questioned (Stiff breeze blew it off? Rabid raccoon chewed through the velcro? Hard sneeze by my husband shot it across the room and I was too stupid to figure out how to put it back on? Okay, maybe I needed more than twenty minutes to come up with a plausible answer.)
The doctor suspected a mild concussion and ordered a CT scan to check for skull fracture or blood clots on the brain. Herbie asked if he would need stitches and the doctor replied that they don't do stitches anymore and staples would be used instead. I flinched, but Herbie took it quite calmly. It was only later that he admitted that he hadn't fully taken in that she meant she would be stapling the back of his head. He just heard, "No stitches."
We accompanied Herbie down to the CT machine and were allowed to stand in the screening room where we could not only see him rolled into the machine, but could watch the scans as they appeared on the computer screen. On occasion, when my husband swears I didn't tell him something that I've actually told him repeatedly and only remembers being told after I repeat the whole conversation to him word for word, I've wondered about his brain. He's a little too young to be having senior moments like that and while I've presumed that stress from work overload is the culprit, there is a little voice in the back of my mind saying, "Take him to Dr. McDreamy!" At last, I had a chance to see his brain in all it's glory and the experts tell me everything is A-okay. No skull fracture, no hematoma, nothing out of the ordinary at all, just a typical husband who doesn't listen to his wife. Great news all around. Plus, my worries that his head wouldn't even fit in the machine were groundless--they managed to squeeze it in.
Back in the examining room, the doctor asked Herbie to lay on his stomach so she could clean and close the wound. That's when the word "staples" actually penetrated Herbie's brain (That may be a bad way to put it. The staples didn't penetrate his brain, thank goodness. He just figured out exactly what was about to happen.) First, she had to clean the wound and she wasn't shy about it. She poured antiseptic into both wounds and wiped repeatedly. M and I squeezed Herbie's calf and murmured words of encouragement while we blinked back tears. We had joked with him while waiting for the doctor and we had taken lots of pictures of the wound at his request, but watching someone you love in extreme pain is a sobering experience and it takes a lot to get me sober.
As if the cleaning hadn't been bad enough, now the doctor had to numb the area so she could insert the staples and there is only one way to do it---big shiny needles stuck right into the cut. I could have gotten every secret Herbie ever kept out of him at that moment, but I refrained. It didn't seem like the appropriate time, plus I'm kinda scared to know what he's keeping secret.
After the area was pretty numb, she took out a tool no bigger than an electric toothbrush and started stapling. He got six staples in the top cut and five in the bottom. You really have to go to your happy place and ignore what is happening right in front of you when someone is stapling your husband's head like his skin flaps are the pages of a high school book report.
Once the stapling was finished, the doctor had Herbie sit up so she could bandage the wound. He had been laying on a plastic pillow and there was a lovely pool of blood filling it's indents. There was blood splashed all over the floor, on the sheets, all over Herbie's arms and hands--it was like a slaughterhouse in there. She told him to have the staples removed in a week, gave him a prescription for antibiotics, and sent him on his way.
I'm happy to say that Herbie is making a full recovery. He ate a good dinner that evening and slept like a baby. We Skyped with my other daughters so he could hold the computer up to his head and show them the gory details. The next day, his actual birthday, I made sure to grab the phone every time it rang so I could "encourage" all his loved ones to give him a lecture about the perils of wandering off into the woods on his own to pursue dangerous tasks. I can't stop thinking, "What if he'd been knocked unconscious?" I wouldn't have even started worrying about him for hours. I would have been blissfully reading or puttering around the cabin thinking he was happily tromping through the woods when in reality he would have been laying on the ground bleeding. And when I did start to worry--where would I begin my search of the 127 acres? I love my dogs, but trackers they are not. They wouldn't be able to pull a Lassie and help me find where Timmy fell down the well.
Speaking of dogs, I hear you can buy a collar with a GPS locating chip in it in case they wander off. I'm thinking of getting one for Herbie. Unfortunately, I'm almost positive they won't have one big enough. Perhaps we'll have to go old school and have Herbie leave a trail of bread crumbs instead. Or meat chunks. Even my fluffy white puppies could follow that trail.
