Our good friend K who we both love and envy as she’s such a good runner, managed to do some serious injury to her head this past weekend. There we were at home enjoying a leisurely uneventful Saturday. No commitments, no plans. Chuck was out in the garage reorganizing the storage shelves (he really enjoys organizing things, and better he organize the garage than, say, my underwear drawer or the pantry in the kitchen) and I was showering after my long run of the week (5 miles, woohoo! I am such an animal of the road – not) when the phone rings. As we have caller ID, it showed up as K, who we knew was enjoying a road trip vacation with her friend S. So Chuck answered, expecting the latest blow by blow retelling of their Thelma and Louise adventures. Surprise! It was S calling on K’s phone. All I heard of the conversation was “Uh-huh” and “Oh no!” and “So she’s in the hospital?” and “They’re doing a CAT scan?” – stuff like that. then he said, something like, “Well, bye.” and hung up. Needless to say, my curiosity was piqued. I said, “So what’s going on?” And he told me that S said that K had passed out while running, hit her head, and was in the hospital. So we packed a bag and drove down to UCSD’s Medical Center where we found K in the trauma room, looking very much the worse for wear. Her head and hair were quite the bloody mess, they had already stitched up the chunk of scalp that had torn open when she fell. Yes, she had quite literally scalped herself.
Here’s what happened: about two miles into her run she started feeling wobbly and dizzy but figured that she could run it off (bad idea). The next thing she knew, she was laying on the ground surrounded by paramedics and passersby and getting loaded into an ambulance. She had fallen backwards after passing out (which was good news for her face) and landed on a curb whacking the top of her head (bad news for her scalp). When we arrived she was conscious and pretty scared. S was feeling not so hot herself – one generally doesn’t like to come across friends laying in the road bleeding copiously from a head wound. We ended up staying the night in San Diego (normally this would have been a fun thing but unfortunately it was the end of Spring Break and there wasn’t a room to be found), spending the night in K and S’s hotel room with S as K was kept overnight for observation.
We ended up bringing K home with us for some r&r and so that Chuck could make sure she didn’t do anything silly like try to go for a ten mile run the next day (I’m only sort of kidding). In the brief periods when she’s been awake since she’s made dinner twice and generally been no trouble at all. Her head looks better but is very sore and she has a lovely gushy blue-highway-road-map of a stitched up incision on the top of her head. Once the hair starts coming in things will start looking up (especially her hair as I know from experience having cut out a wad of gum that somebody accidentally spit into my hair. All was well for about two weeks, and then the new hair started sticking straight up on the top of my head.).
The moral of the story: um, there is no moral. Well, don’t fall down might work. Or maybe don’t fall down on curbs (I know this from my ankle, actually) or maybe always wear protective clothing when you go outside or (and this one makes some sense, as K ended up in the hospital as Jane Doe) always carry ID with you when you go running/biking/hiking.
Gory pictures can be found here. Even gorier pictures can be found here.