Broken voicebox, broken head

  • It’s been a weird week here with Mr. & Mrs. This-side-of-glory.

    For my part, my cold is mostly gone, but it looks like it’ll be a long time before my voice is com­pletely nor­mal. I was afraid of this. I injured my vocal cords about five years ago by singing incor­rectly, and ever since then, I’ve been prone to this. I don’t feel that much under the weather — maybe just a lit­tle iffy — but I’ll stay home from church tomor­row anyway.

    I mean, it was one thing when I just had a deep voice. It just gave me a Garbo-esque woman-of-mystery quality:

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    But things have just gone down­hill from there, and now I sound like Andy Devine. For young­sters, I’ll men­tion that Andy Devine was a char­ac­ter actor who was around just for­ever and very much in demand for voice-overs, owing to his um, “spe­cial” vocal qual­ity. He was the voice of Friar Tuck in Disney’s “Robin Hood” and one of the talk­ing bul­lets in “Roger Rabbit.”

    If that’s still not ring­ing a bell, try lis­ten­ing to one or both of the old corn flakes com­mer­cials below, and then ask your­self if you’d want Cor­nelius to sing the Tropar­ion of the Res­ur­rec­tion in Tone 8 this week in your church:

    So that’s my fun. And what’s Greg been up to? Oh, I almost for­got. He got hit with a fly­ing com­puter mon­i­tor and now he has sta­ples in his head.

    So any­way …

    .
    Out for a spin … literally

    This was all on Thurs­day. A lot of our snow had melted, so Greg thought he would take him­self out to suck up some free wi-fi some­where and do a lit­tle work away from home. There was some fresh rain and snow com­ing down, so he took the cam­era hop­ing to catch some good pic­tures. But he hadn’t got­ten more than about five miles away when he could tell that the sleety junk that was falling was really mak­ing it hard to drive safely, so he just started look­ing for a place to turn around.

    And then it happened …

    crashday.jpg

    There weren’t any other cars around, and Greg was still dri­ving straight ahead. But sud­denly the back end of the car lost trac­tion and started to slide. By the time he’d cor­rected the spin, he was dri­ving side­ways. So the car went into a shal­low ditch, bounced off the embank­ment (los­ing the fender) and then spun around the way he’d come.

    Another dri­ver came along right away — that’s the nice lady in the white truck above who’s mak­ing sure traf­fic stops while Greg took a pic­ture in case our insur­ance needed to see it. Not that the traf­fic wouldn’t have stopped — it’s not every day you see a guy walk­ing around with blood run­ning down his face. He was seat-belted in when the acci­dent hap­pened and prob­a­bly wouldn’t have been injured, except there was a client’s com­puter mon­i­tor in the back seat and when the car hit, the mon­i­tor must’ve just gone fly­ing. And wouldn’t you know it, it couldn’t have been one of those new light­weight, flat-panel jobs. Oh no, it was one of those gigan­tic old num­bers that weighs as much as a bunch of sledge­ham­mers. The cor­ner must’ve clipped Greg on the side of his head, and it just opened up an inch-long wound.

    Thank God, it was only a flesh wound, but it did bleed quite a bit. When I first met up with him at the place the car had been towed, Greg was brightly greet­ing me and telling me he was fine, every­thing was fine, it was all fine-fine. And it would have been a real com­fort, except that he still had two dark lines of dried blood down one side of his face. When I made an invol­un­tary noise, he turned away to spare me the trauma, which would’ve been a good instinct, except that at some point he had wiped his bloody hand off on the seat of his pants, which I think was almost more shock­ing to look at.

    While we got the car seen to, we fig­ured out what to do about the boy. He had can­celed the ambu­lance that had been called, just because there had been some crossed wires some­where and it looked like it would’ve taken a solid hour to get there. He felt fine, not even a headache, but then we all thought that a man who’d been hit with a com­puter mon­i­tor took some look­ing after.

    As it turned out, luck was on our side. The emer­gency room of the nearby hos­pi­tal had absolutely noth­ing going on, and Greg was able to walk right in. They asked him enough ques­tions to fig­ure out it wasn’t a con­cus­sion, cleaned up the wound (no more Mr. Murder-victim) and then they sta­pled the wound. This is news to me — what, med­ical types can’t be both­ered to give a per­son good, hon­est stitches any­more? Well, appar­ently not. They didn’t even give him an anes­thetic for it — just sta­pled him in the head like he was a multi-page doc­u­ment. Per­pet­ual Sci­en­tist that he is, Greg asked them to give him one of the sta­ples to take home. Which they did. It’s out in the rental car. I think Greg’ll prob­a­bly make me look at it a cou­ple more times before I get to throw it away, until he’s ready to replace it with the sta­ples that they take out in a week or so.

    For now, he’s a lit­tle Staple-head. You can reach under his sandy locks and feel lit­tle metal edges. Ick. My poor sweetie.

    He still feels fine. He had some mus­cle aches the next day and a really mild headache. It could’ve been much worse. As Greg was dri­ving the car in with the tow-truck, they passed two other spin-outs. The tow-truck dri­ver told him that the two pas­sen­gers of one of the wrecks had gone to the hospital.

    So we’re both very thank­ful. Greg even found time back while wait­ing for the tow-truck to take the kind of win­ter pic­ture he had wanted to get. I think it came out really beau­ti­ful. Prob­a­bly not worth a bro­ken car and busted head over, but then noth­ing is.

    lone_tree.jpg


    Related posts:

    1. Decem­ber 2
    2. Strange noth­ing­ness
    3. Life as it should be
    4. Slightly bro­ken
    5. Death and vacations

    January 12th, 2008 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 01.12.2008

    Thank God it was only sta­ples. I drove in an ice storm between Abi­lene and Lub­bock in 1977. I spun out but was only dri­ving 5 mph, spun down the high­way 4 or 5 time then down a hun­dred yard embank­ment onto a farm road below. It took me about 8 hours to make the drive home. I really like PICTURES of snow. :)

  • Mimi

    Thanks be to God it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Yikes! Prayers.

  • c sue b

    Silly Greg. Com­puter mon­i­tors, spin outs, blood, sta­ples, a win­try pic­ture. We’re so happy that you’re all right … & that you have another Way Cool Story to add to your reper­tory of col­or­ful life expe­ri­ences. As it should be.

  • Grace

    Def­i­nitely. I’ll have to make sure he knows that he doesn’t need to do things like this just so we’ll have inter­est­ing sto­ries to tell. :-)

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