People Who Have Glass Heads Shouldn't Play Basketball

Well, I just got home from the emergency room about an hour ago. Not exactly the way I wanted to spend my Thursday evening after a morning duty, after-school duty, and faculty meeting.

My boy has a glass head. That's the only plausible explanation. It seems like only five months ago that we were at a different ER for his concussion.

Wouldn't you know it? On a day when he finally got into a live 5-on-5 scrimmage, he had to knock his noggin on the cinder block wall of the gym. Unbeknownst to me, of course. I have been staying away from the gym during real basketball practice, except for that little relapse yesterday when I stood at the rail talking to Mr. S.

There I was, sitting in my room about 4:15, ready to enter some assignments into my gradebook program, when I heard my #1 son out in the hall. He said, "I'm good." I turned to say, "Are you finished already?" There he was, holding a green towel to his head, blood dripping off the end of his nose to join the spots on his shirt and shorts and new basketball shoes. That's right. NEW basketball shoes, which came yesterday and were handed to him by the coach, worn for the very first time today, Nike Hyperize in purple and white. And red.

I jumped up to pull the towel from his head, and jammed it right back on his cranium. There was a cut over his left eye, just above the eyebrow, in the shape of an upside-down T, with the corner pieces pulled back, leaving a puckery-looking, gushing wound. All I could tell him was, "Everybody knows that facial cuts bleed a lot." I quickly locked my laptop, since my log-off feature does not work, which I found out Friday after logging off, and finding a nasty note from the Tech Dude about how I was a menace to society and I left my laptop unsecured, and kids could have broken into my room and fiddled with grades willy-nilly. I'm estimating that cut to be about an inch long and half-inch tall. If my boy was a maple tree, that would be the perfect place to drain the sap from him. Buckets of sap.

According to #1, he had blocked a pass from Concussor, and was jumping out of bounds at the baseline to save the ball. He threw out his elbow to stop from slamming into the wall, but the great inertia of his magnificent melon could not be stopped. His head slammed into the wall. Blood immediately gushed forth, and he ran to the locker room, trailed by about seven varsity players, while his own JV cronies stood on the court and watched. One of the assistant coaches ran in the locker room and grabbed the first thing he could find, that being the green towel off the floor. Sweet Gummi Mary only knows if somebody had used that towel to dry his butt after a shower. The AC told #1 to go wash the blood off his hands, and one of the varsity players shored him up in case of collapse. They had a short debate as to whether #1 needed stitches, and the AC told him, "Run to your mom's room and tell her to take you to the hospital NOW!" They're a mite bossy, those coaches. They need to thank the Gummi Mary that it was a teacher's kid who got the life fluid knocked out of him. A teacher who hangs around waiting for practice to be over and drive her kid home. And a kid who didn't faint from the sight of his own blood on the way up the stairs to his mom's room.

#1 was a bit shaky. He is not fond of doctors and needles. He kept urging me to GO FASTER. Paula Deen in my front yard eating a lobster tail! I told him to calm down, it's not like he was having a baby. We'd get there when we got there. All he needed to do was hold pressure on that gushing wound. On the way, I called HH and told him we were headed to the ER closest to the Mansion. I called my mom to tell her that meeting us with The Pony at 5:15 was out of the question. #1 declared that now was not the time to talk on the phone, and I needed to get crackin' on this trip to the hospital. I told him I was already going the speed limit, and he said to speed anyway and if I got stopped, we could get a police escort to the hospital. Man! You would think that kid thought he was indeed having a baby, like that matron in The Thrill of it All. I'm surprised he didn't tell me to boil some water.

The ER took him in and laid him down and put some nice alcohol wipes over his wound. Then we waited 45 minutes for the doctor to put Humpty back together again. He was a little old bald doctor around 80 years old. The nurse said #1 picked a good night to come in, what with the doc on duty being a former surgeon who could stitch like nobody's business. He pumped #1 full of local anesthetic and commenced to sewing with a long white thread that soon turned red. Then he used black stitches on the outside, nine of them, which will need to be removed in 5-7 days. Doc said they are not the dissolving kind of stitch. He sure took his time. The numbing agent began to wear off. #1 questioned him about it, but he said only five more and he would be done.

Somebody is going to be popular with the ladies tomorrow!