Massive Head Wound Harry Takes a Trip

I woke up the morning after the fall with the head wrap still in place and only a little blood in the gauze. Great first aid by me, if I say so myself. As we got ready to head out for our morning walk, Lauren said, “I hope you’re planning to take that thing off,” pointing at the head dressing.

“Uh, why?”

“Cuz if you wear it, every person we know in the neighborhood is going to stop to ask you about it, and I just don’t have time for that today.”

“I could try putting my baseball cap over it.”

“That will look ridiculous. Just take it off. You can put it back on after your shower, if you need to.”

Keeping up appearances for the neighbors—these are what pass for ethics around here. As we walked, Lauren said, “How did you think you could hide this from me?”

“Well, it’s in the back of my head, and since you don’t spend a lot of time looking at the back of my head—“

She guffawed. “Isn’t there a character? Massive Head Wound Harry?“

“Yes, a Saturday Night Live character.”

“Right. That’s you. How do you think I wouldn’t notice Massive Head Wound Harry lying in my bed?”

We got through the walk, and I dutifully reported to the urgent care clinic. After seating me in the patient room, the medical assistant asked me what I was being seen for. I explained, and then she said, “Wait, did you call last night?”

“I did.”

“We told you to go to the ER.”

“And I told you I wasn’t doing that.”

She sighed heavily. “Well, let’s get a look at the wound.”

The nurse practitioner came in, and they looked at the wound. “Oh, wow! It’s closed up and clean and looks really good. Whoever treated this did a great job.”

That’s right, folks. I did a great job!

They gave me two staples anyway because that area of the scalp “moves a lot.” Then I headed home.

I put in a full workday. In the evening, my muscles were sore from a big lift I had done, and my head hurt. So I went to the cabinet to grab some ibuprofen. I get migraines, and my doctor has told me to take three or even four tablets at the outset of a headache. We had recently run out of our ibuprofen that normally comes in a big bottle looking like this.

So I had had to buy a small bottle, like so.

I popped four of these and settled in front of the television to write some of my novel and watch soccer. Suddenly, a surge of anxiety rushed through my body. My eyelids felt impossibly heavy, but my limbs grew twitchy and unmanageable. I was unable to concentrate, unable to work on my novel, unable to sleep, but unable to do anything else meaningful except lie on the couch and twitch. Meanwhile, Lauren came in to announce that her boss wanted to meet with her the next day and she felt relatively certain she was being fired.

“That’s absurd,” I said. “You just got promoted. At your team day, everyone was telling you how well you are doing and what a trusted resource you are.”

“I just feel so anxious, though,” she said. “And I can’t shake it.”

After three hours of suffering on the couch, my episode suddenly ended. In a snap, I felt fine and back to myself. As part of my visit to urgent care, I had gotten a tetanus booster. I looked up symptoms of both post-concussion syndrome and the tetanus shot and found restlessness among the side effects for both. Had to be one of those, we figured.

The next morning, I awoke, exercised, and felt general soreness. Just before starting work, I took more ibuprofen and settled into my day. Half an hour later, I felt all the same weirdness come over me again—anxiety, exhaustion, inability to concentrate, restlessness. I let my work colleagues know that I might be suffering from post-concussion syndrome and that I might have to take the rest of the day off. I planned to get through a noon meeting and see how I felt.

Upstairs, Lauren likewise had a headache come on. She took ibuprofen and settled into a meeting whereupon she began having a similar episode. Worse, an hour later, she had to drive to get Graham from work and struggled with lethargy the whole way. And then it struck her: What medicine had she actually taken?

When Lauren got home, she checked the cabinet and hollered at me: “Gordon, you didn’t buy Advil the other day. You bought sleep aid!”

I had bought something sort of like Benadryl, and then we had taken eight times the recommended dosage. Yikes!

I talked with a friend who said, “In my younger days, I experimented with, uh, some illicit substances. When I did, my reaction was pretty much what you had, which is why I never really messed with them after that. But yeah, what happened to you and Lauren is y’all were trippin.”

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