Rant $3,127: Head Games

This past weekend was pretty much a throwaway, but what happened late last week just added another brick to my family’s already heavy load.

On Thursday morning, everything seemed fine with us … my wife and son went to work, and since that day of the week is my shopping day, I prepared to go to the supermarket as I also prepared to do some of my own work later on at home.

I went to the supermarket as planned, and as I was coming home to drop off the groceries before eating lunch, doing some work, and picking up my son, I received a call from my wife sometime after 11 a.m. which was pretty alarming.

“I am in the hospital,” she told me. “I hurt my finger at work, and please come over to the hospital.”

So I had to pivot from being about half-way home to going to a hospital I had never been to. I used the GPS on my phone, and I found where I had to go, and arrived there pretty quickly.

I went to the emergency room, and was led to where she was, and she was with a doctor there.

“How is your finger?” I asked, and before my wife had a chance to reply, the doctor cut in and said, “I’m afraid the finger is the least of her problems.”

What I soon learned is that much more happened than a bloody finger that put my wife in the hospital.

My wife had a fractured skull.

At that point, they had no idea of the severity of the injury, and let me tell you what happened for her to get such an injury.

My wife works in a restaurant which specializes in salads. It is a small chain, and she has worked in this particular restaurant since it opened about six months ago.

She is part of the prep staff, and went about her duties that day like any other day, which meant cutting and preparing all different types of vegetables for the salads.

She was cutting beets using a machine, and the beets got caught in the machine.

My wife reached her hand into the mechanism to clean it out so the beets would go through, and she cut herself on the cutting blade.

She saw blood, fainted, and fell backward onto the floor, with the full force of the fall being on her head.

She was knocked out for several minutes as a hospital ambulance came to get her, and after an examination, it was determined that she had a fractured skull.

This particular hospital does not have a unit that specializes in severe skull injuries, so my wife was eventually transferred to another hospital—and was released later that evening, as the injury is supposedly not as severe as it could have been.

She still has a skull fracture—incredibly, no concussion--but it is a hairline fracture, she has a bad bump on her head, and she is pretty much restricted in what she can do for the foreseeable future.

She cannot drive, she cannot exercise, she cannot do anything taxing, so she is basically relegated to the couch for at least the next week or so until we go to the doctor next Monday.

She actually was very lucky, as the injury is evidently not severe enough to require surgery.

So right now, she has to heal, to get better, and is doing that by being a couch potato and by taking the medicine that they gave her … but she has felt sick and not herself the past few days, which I guess is understandable after what she went through.

I pray that she gets better quickly and is OK, but when you are dealing with this type of injury, the rehab is not immediate, and can take quite a while depending on the severity of the injury and the person who has the injury.

She just got up from sleep, and she told me that she feels a bit better, less wobbly than before, but she is really going to have to bide her time until we can get to the doctor next week.

This could have been so much worse, but it is bad enough, especially for an active person that can’t sit on the couch too much and gets antsy pretty quickly.

So we just have to wait this thing out, will find out more about it in a week, and we just have to thank our lucky stars that it wasn’t worse than it actually was.

Now, we play the waiting game on this thing, and in a week, I am sure my wife will be fine … but I think her days at this job are pretty much over, as it is too difficult for her to do this type of work … and who knows, at this point, when she can do any work outside of the home?

When the dust settles, if she wants to continue to work—or more importantly, needs to work—she is going to have to find a less demanding job than this one, where she constantly complained about leg and back pain.

Yes, I am putting the cart before the horse, and I really shouldn’t do that.

Let her get better and back to normal first, and then we will deal with that part of the equation.

I hope and pray that she is OK and can heal as quickly as possible.

I love my wife and I hate to see her in this condition … she will get all the time she needs to mend, however long it takes.