A little bump in the road

Two weeks ago was FCNL's Annual Meeting, Thursday afternoon to Sunday. I took Raleigh to Colin's to stay there for the weekend so we could share dog duties. On Saturday morning we were biking up Pennsylvania Ave's bike lane to get to the Annual Meeting hotel when I crashed my bike.

Actually, my memory of the morning goes like this:
I'm leading, and I'm feeling good. The air is cool but not cold, the bike wants to go. I'm cruising -- not too fast, but not dawdling, either. We're getting close to the White House, where the lane ends. We're at maybe 11th or 12th.

Then I'm being loaded into an ambulance, strapped to the stretcher. Colin climbs in the front. I fade out.

I'm on the stretcher in the ambulance. There's a guy near my head and he's talking to me. He's asking me something. He's asking me if I know where I am, what day it is. I think about it. I have to think about thinking in order to think. Thinking is slow. I have no idea what month it is, what time of day, why I am in an ambulance. Thinking is like wading through a thick sludge. Slowly it comes to me that maybe, possibly, it is the weekend. I think I was going somewhere. Is it the weekend? More wading. Is it November? Maybe? The guy, my ambulance buddy, asks me if I know how old I am. Or maybe question was first, before November? I slowly process the words, individually, then as a unit. I think about it. I think slowly about it. I can't remember if I'm 22 or 23. I start to get upset. How can I not remember how old I am? I think that maybe I just had a birthday. I am pretty sure I'm 22 or 23.

Then we are at the hospital. My ambulance guy asks me if I use instructables.com. "Instructables?" I say. "No," somewhat authoritatively, although 10 minutes ago (20? more?) I couldn't have told you what month it was. "I guess I lost that bet," he says, laughing.

They wheel me in, I guess, but I'm in and out. Colin is there, answering questions before I've waded through what it was that was just asked. Good. I probably couldn't answer, anyway.

I ask Colin what happened. "You crashed your bike," he tells me. "I crashed my bike?" I can't remember crashing my bike. I start to get upset again. I crashed my bike. I can't remember crashing my bike. I can't remember.

Doctors come in and out. They slowly turn my head, check my spine, unstrap me. My spine is not broken. They give me a tetanus shot, which hurts more than my head. I follow fingers left and right without moving my head, up and down. Lights in my eyes. More fingers. A woman takes me to get a CT scan. Colin has to wait. The woman, a different woman, tells me to close my eyes and be still. I tell her that won't be a problem. All I want to do is close my eyes and be still.

They scan my head. Slowly up and down, pausing here and there. Whirring. It's like being a sheet of paper in a machine, with the line of light that I can see, moving, through my closed eyelids.

Just out of the hospital, going to CVS

We go back to the room with the curtain and the machines and a view of the nurses' station. More time passes. They tell me my CT scan is negative -- that's a good thing. It means I just have a concussion. I am to take it easy and take pain pills. I might have headaches for a while, or I might not. I am free to go.

Colin and I get directions to a CVS to get me ibuprofen, Tylenol with codeine, and sunglasses. I guess I was wearing mine when I crashed. They're bent. The CVS pharmacy is closed, so I get sunglasses and we take a cab to Annual Meeting. Colin gives directions. Colin gets the key to Tommy's room, where I gratefully lay down.

Colin wakes me up for business meeting, like I asked. This is why I'm at Annual Meeting -- for the business meetings. I am not going to miss business meeting. I think Colin got pills while I slept, though now, two weeks later, I can't remember. I sit behind the sound equipment with Colin, who, after seeing me motionless on the pavement, does not want me to go too far away. He saved me a veggie wrap from lunch, he brings me juice and water. I'm very hungry, but I realize I must have jammed my jaw because it hurts terribly to chew. My head hurts. Everything is slow. I take more codeine and ibuprofen.

I feel like I might puke -- probably the ibuprofen on a nearly empty stomach, my jaw too sore to chew. It's almost the end of business meeting but I stand up, go slowly to the bathroom. I sit on the toilet, put my head in my hands. I am not going to throw up, so I get up and go to the lobby.

Standing there, telling some FCNL people what happened, why I am now fine and able to go to business meeting, everything starts rushing. The sides, my peripheral, starts to go fuzzy and drop away. I know this. This happened to me once before. "A chair, get me a chair," I say. Stephen's face is worried, he gets me a chair. The rushing is so loud I can't hear them, can hardly hear myself. They want to lay me on the floor, but people are coming out of business meeting. "Not here," I say. I hear, "A wheelchair. Yes, now!" I fade out.

We're at the elevator. It's very important that I be backed into the elevator. I have a group of waists around me. I fade out again.

They're trying to get me through the door to Tommy's room, but the wheelchair is too wide. They have the wheelchair tipped and my head is falling back. There is a belly behind me but too far to lean my head on. It hurts. The wheelchair is too wide, so they carry me, although I am in and out. I'm on the bed. The rushing is quieting. My peripheral is coming back. "I feel better," I say. "I'm feeling better." Two members of the General Committee who are physicians are there, and they are worried about my blood getting to my brain, worried that I passed out (sort of, nearly), worried about leaving me without a promise of monitoring. I am put back in the wheelchair. We go back to the hospital.

Raleigh earned his Pupperoni last night

Last night at about 3am I suddenly heard banging on our front door. Raleigh hesitated for about half a second, presumably to assure himself that it wasn't just a dream, and started his furious WHY YOU AT MY DOOR I WILL GET YOU AWAY FROM MY DOOR OR LICK YOUR PANTS ONE OR THE OTHER hound bark, the one that sometimes happens in the middle of the night and I tell him to please yell at the air molecules more quietly in the future, except that this time it was 3 in the morning and there was some persistent pounding on our door going on.

The banging stopped and I went to Elise's room, where she told me that there had been someone honking and yelling for half an hour and she didn't realize the yelling was directed at our house, but then there was the banging on the door. I looked from the side of her curtain at the black SUV double parked in front of our house and to my horror saw the driver notice me and get out of the car and start waving furiously. My Oh Shit moment included "We don't have any lights on how can she see in the window" accompanied by "There are too many fucking windows downstairs for me to go down there because last I checked glass doesn't stop bullets and what if this woman thinks her husband is banging some 19 year old hottie in this house and that's why she's here and she has a gun or what if she's got someone else with her and NO WAY am I opening the door at 3am." Elise and I agreed we should call the cops, just so they would send a cruiser by, and as she was on the phone with our precinct a cruiser came by, paused next to the car, and then they both pulled forward out of site. We couldn't tell from our angle if the cop was still there or if it had just told the lady to stop double parking and then cruised on.

Then the banging started again, this time on the door and also the metal knocker. BANGBANGBANGBANGBANG pause BANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANGBANG and meanwhile Raleigh going WHY ARE YOU STILL AT MY DOOR GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY DOOR OR GIVE ME SOME PUPPERONIS BUT STOP IT WITH THE RACKET I WAS ASLEEP WHY ARE YOU STILL BANGING. I said to Elise that there was no way I was answering the door and we should call 911. She asked if I wanted to or if she should but I already had the phone in my hand and was saying "There is someone pounding on our door and there's been someone honking and yelling for half an hour and I am not going to answer the door at 3:20am because I don't know who it is please can you send someone." Then we noticed that there was a cop, maybe two cops (realized later it was a cop standing next to the lady from the car) in front of our house so Elise and I agreed that with a cop right there probably no one was going to shoot us and we should maybe open the door because the BANGING and the HOUNDBARKING wasn't going to stop unless we answered the door.

We went down, the two of us -- Raleigh already at the door -- and I yelled "Who is it?" "The police!" was the answer I got. I hollered that we hadn't opened the door because we didn't know who it was and I was going to put my dog on a leash so he wouldn't run out the door, and Raleigh was all "Oh, a walk? Cool!" So we opened the door to the cop who started asking us about the woman's son, which I guess is why she was honking and yelling and banging, she was looking for her son, and the cop was asking us about some guy named Mike, and asking us for our IDs, and the whole time Elise and I were standing there wide eyed and shaking explaining that there wasn't a man in the house unless he snuck in, no one named Mike lived here, we don't know where that woman's son is, and the woman was saying something about Oh, he must have gone to some other place. She piped up from the sidewalk that someone had been peeping from behind the curtain and Elise said, yeah, that was us! because someone had been honking and yelling and totally freaking us out and no way were we going to go downstairs with that going on. The cop said something about a call for help from one of the houses, and we said "That was us! Someone was banging on our door at 3:20am and we didn't know who it was!" The cop at the door turned to his partner on the sidewalk and said, "This is fucking ridiculous." He turned back to us and told us he was sorry for bothering us, that we could go back to bed now.

So we'll be getting a chain for the front door today. And I'll probably not yell at Raleigh for barking at air molecules in the middle of the night for a while.