“Wow! Look at that guy in the movie! He slid down right down the banister like it was nothing. That was so cool, I wanna try it!”
Sliding down the banister huh? Good luck with that kid.
“...Who are you?”
Name’s Matt. I slid down the banister once when I was a kid. And that’s how I got this SCAR!
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I never understood why so many kids shows have to warn their audience to “not try this at home.” I mean I know we are young and all, but do they really think we are gonna imitate everything we see on television?
Well, I guess I’m one to talk. I was one of those kids who copied something he saw on the big screen and paid a hefty price for it (seriously, medical bills are expensive). And I’m not just talking about “Oh, I fell out of my tree house and now I have a broken arm.” I’m talking “Oh, I fell head first onto wood and am in a life or death situation now.”
Yeah, I cracked my skull when I was five years old. I was one of those cool kids with a scar to show off my manliness to the whole world. I should have been seen as like the tough kid, who ain’t afraid of nuthin’. Instead I was the weakling that got pushed around by others on the playground.
Since I’ve already shared every other medical incident in my life, I see no reason why I shouldn’t share this one. So let’s take a trip to the past when I cracked my skull wide open.
Like I said, I was five years old when this happened. Not exactly the age you want to be cracking your skull. I remember I saw this thing somewhere on television, I don’t remember what it was, that showed a guy sliding down the banister of his house to greet people. If you don’t know what a banister is, here’s a picture:
(Note, this is obviously not my banister. I have since moved to a house with a banister that I can’t foolishly slide down).
I wanted to replicate it. Why? Because it looked cool. Why else do people imitate what they see on T.V?
One day, my dad called me down from my bedroom for a spaghetti lunch, getting my Finding Nemo chair ready for me to sit down and eat. I, of course, took this opportunity to slide down the banister like the stunt professional that I was (oh wait).For the first couple of seconds, all was going well. I was actually sliding with relative ease downwards. Then, I started to tilt.
I fell what must have been like 8-10 feet down, head-first, onto a wooden coffee table. Now my father always likes to point out how unlucky I was. If I had just fallen a couple seconds later, I would have landed on the couch. I like to look at it a little differently. From the table in question that is pictured below, I probably would have died if I had fallen a couple seconds earlier and went face first through glass. Maybe landing on the wooden edge wasn’t the worst result.
But man if that wasn’t the worst pain I have ever had to experience in my entire life. I was in so much blinding pain. I don’t remember exactly what the pain felt like, but I do know I was balling my eyes out.
My dad rushed me to the emergency room. He had to stop briefly to let our neighbors know where we were going and to look after my sleeping brother. I wonder what this was like for my brother. He’s just casually taking a nap, then wakes up to find out his brother was taken to the hospital from cracking the skull. “Maybe I should just go back to bed.”
My visit to the emergency room was all a big blur. I remember I had to get a CT scan, they probably injected a bunch of painkillers into me to relieve the pain. My grandpa came to the hospital to support me and my father.
At some point, they determined that I needed to be transferred to a different hospital. Because of the urgency of my condition, they had to transfer me on a helicopter. The first time in my life I got to ride on a helicopter. How did I spend it? Lying down, throwing up into a bin while a medical worker tended to me. Those first time’s are always the most memorable.
When I got to the new hospital, they had to cut me out of my favorite Thomas the Tank Engine T-shirt (rest in peace shirt) and tend to me. Luckily, this new hospital was close to where my mother was working that day. She pretty much rushed right over to where I was to see how her baby boy was doing.
I was in the hospital for quite a while. A couple of weeks at the shortest. It’s kind of hard to focus on the passage of time when part of your skull is bashed in. I had to have surgery on my skull to repair the damages. The doctors said that the dent in my skull was just shy of hitting my brain. I was a mere centimeters from experiencing long term brain damage. They patched me up with stitches, which was also an unpleasant time. I had to lay perfectly still for the guy to put the stitches in my head, which meant I couldn’t move my hands to scratch my nose. The horror!
I had to go back to Kindergarten. But I still had to have a bunch of medical tubes and stitches on my head. I don’t think I’d be the only one freaked out if my head dent was fully exposed to a room of five year old kids. To resolve this issue, the doctors gave me this hat to wear while I was recovering. Lets see how I can describe this hat: it was like wearing the most irritating Smurf cap ever.
I wore that white hat for quite a while. I remember the day before I could have all my stitches removed was picture day. So my kindergarten yearbook photo makes me look like I came right out of the Smurf village. Totally discovered it before Gargamel.
The stitches were removed the next day, and I was back to living the life I once knew. The only difference? I now had a scar right over my right eyebrow. I still have it to this day, it makes this weird triangular shape with lines where they cut me open.
Looking back, this might have been the worst experience of my life. But it was also one of the luckiest. I could very easily have gone through the glass in the table, I could have had the bone puncture my brain, or my surgery could have gone wrong. And yet here I am, alive and writing all of this to you.
I guess at the end of the day, there’s always a way a terrible situation can go worse. If you make it out of the experience alive, take it as a win. What doesn’t kill you makes you feel so lucky that it didn’t. And you get stronger, learning from the past and being ready for the future. Can definitely confirm I won’t be sliding down banisters any time soon.
Until the next one, stay Mattastic! (And don’t slide down the banister!)
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