Trigger warning: if real things that happen in the world and are depicted on a website trigger you, perhaps the internet is the wrong place for you. So, cover your eyes, snowflake.
We are calling this thing The Oklahoma Chainsaw Massacre, The Great Botched Tree Caper, or The Stoppable Force Connects with the Movable Object. Maybe Blood Walnut.
Bruised and Bloody but with an Attitude
Under no circumstances do we refer to it as “an accident.” I just don’t like the sound of it. It reminds me of the coworker who lost one of her pinky fingers in an ATV accident.
Anyway. Whack. Thump. I’m down, and poor Robert, who made pictures during and after the event, is faced with picking up my crumpled pieces. I initially seemed pretty hurt, but it wasn’t really a brush with death. It was more like that little comb I use to groom my beard. It was a comb with death.
A Bad Hair Day
It is unassailably true that changes in the air and water around us can profoundly affect how we look, and being caked in my own blood certainly gave me a bad hair day.
As I looked over the scene the last few days, which I did every day since it is on my dog-walking route, I concluded that instead of falling straight down like I anticipated, this long, heavy branch rotated against a spot where the middle of the branch rested on the ground, rotating toward me as it fell.
After measuring it and photographing it, I began cutting up this branch and putting it on the burn pile.
As I write this, it has been three weeks since the crunch, and people seem surprised by the idea that I am not in pain, and have completely recovered. I have no idea if this is blind luck, or if choices led me through it, whether they were choices about my daily health or the less-tangible notion that I am a mentally-healthy person. Those habits certainly didn’t work against me.
Thoughts About Opioid Pain Medication
“My Vicodin habit.” ~ Matthew Perry, from his book Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing
Readers might recall from the first post about this, I said that in the hospital, I asked for Tylenol, but was offered Dilaudid and Vicodin, neither of which were sedating or effective for my pain, and had little actual effect on my overall demeanor. Part of it might have been due to the fact that since I didn’t have all that much pain, the effect of these drugs was negligible.
My wife reluctantly relied on these drugs for her quality of life in her last years, and my late friend Pam related that she did as well. These drugs exist for a reason: to reduce suffering.
I am, however, very aware that using such medications has the potential for dire consequences, having witnessed it first-hand in my community, and after I read Matthew Perry’s book.
He was given one Vicodin after a Jet Ski accident, and was immediately transformed. He doesn’t mention the dosage, but it’s only available in 5mg, 7.5mg, and 10mg.
“I swallowed the pill…” Perry wrote. “As the pill kicked in, something clicked in me. And it’s been that click I’ve been chasing the rest of my life… I felt so good that if a locomotive had hit me, I would simply have turned to the engineer and said, ‘It happens, brother.’ I couldn’t believe how good it felt; I was in complete and pure euphoria. The pill had replaced the blood in my body with warm honey. It was the greatest feeling I’d ever had.”
I didn’t experience any of those feelings.
Everyone knows some physical pain, and everyone wants it to be relieved, sometimes without being very concerned with the consequences. But this seemed to be something else, something physio-mechanical, something substantively different between my brain and Matthew Perry’s brain.
Or is it something buried deep in the psychology of each of us? Perry wrote in no uncertain terms that long before the Jet Ski accident, he was a very unhappy person. And everyone who knows me knows that I am a fundamentally happy person.
What’s Next?
Instead of being finished with chainsaws, I need to take them to the next level: flying chainsaws, rifle-mounted chainsaw launcher, chainsaw left running while I go to the bathroom, chainsaw piñata. Oh, I love the sound of that last one.
So, does this say that I am hard-headed, thick-headed, or maybe a lame brain or a numbscull? Did this knock some sense into me or out of me? Did it knock my scruples out?
A Couple of Odd Notes
After a night in the hospital, PT/OT (physical therapy/occupational therapy) took me for a walk to make sure it was safe to send me home. I did fine, but was surprised to learn two little items I never saw in in all of Abby’s myriad physical therapy. First, the therapist dropped her pen on the floor in front of me. I don’t know if patients realize it’s on purpose, but they asked me to pick up the pen. “Good one,” I said. The other one was simply to take off one sock and put it back on. I thought that was oddly specific, but it must show some specific ability or deficit.
A subarachnoid hemorrhage (link: read all about it) is a very dangerous condition, but if I had a slight one, it was gone in just a few hours. It was smart to watch me, since we all know people whose head injuries resulted in a traumatic brain injury and even death.
Why I Ignored the Spot on My Lung
An impressively television-star-looking attending physician in Oklahoma City saw me that evening to tell me my second CT scan showed no bleeding in my brain. During that conversation, he chided me for ignoring a recommendation from a chest radiograph in 2020, which showed a nodule in one of my lungs. I tried to explain that the nodule hadn’t been discovered in 2020, it had been rediscovered. It was a remnant of the time I was 10 and my sister was seven and shared a hospital room for a couple of weeks with double pneumonia. Treatment at the time was placing patients in moist oxygen tents, while shooting us full of intramuscular cephalexin, so there were permanent scars in our lung tissues. In retrospect, we were almost certainly so sick because of the constant pall of second-hand smoke in our home, the dangers of which were only starting to become clear.
My sister has the same evidence on her pulmonary radiographs.
I finally told him I “just did” ignore it, and he admitted it was the same today as it was on the radiograph six years ago.
It, and the whole hospitalization, made me wonder how much of modern medicine is really for patient benefit, and how much of it is an undercurrent of running medicine as a business. You have to run a business as a business; hospitals can go bankrupt just like any other concern. But I wonder if their weekly staff meetings included any kind of urging to order expensive tests, with a wink from the CFO. If this same incident happened to me 30 years ago, for example, before local hospitals had CT machines, I would have been sent home with an ice pack and orders for someone to “keep an eye on him.”
If this sounds like left-wing conspiracy theory, consider this: a local hospital I cover for my newspaper has fired three CEOs in the last 15 years for not making enough money.
Six days after the plunge, I had a follow-up with a doctor remotely via an app. He immediately noticed I wasn’t wearing the cervical collar they had made me wear for my day and night in the ER and the hospital. I told him, truthfully, that it was the most painful thing of the whole episode, but I didn’t tell him that I ripped it off the second we were out of sight on the drive home from the hospital. I could tell right away that it wasn’t doing me a bit of good.
Actually, that’s not true. The most painful thing of the whole experience was when they ripped off the round pads they stuck on me for the 12-lead ECG. It was like being tasered. A couple of them didn’t come off on the first yank, and when they did come off, they left behind little bald spots on my hairy chest.
Then, as I wrote this, the same ambulance and the same helicopter responded to a similar event not far from here. A 26-year-old man fell out of a tree and was unconscious. As they flew him to facility in OKC, I heard the patient report on the frequency say the key phrase “ETOH on board,” meaning the man had been drinking. So, yeah, there are incidents, and there are incidents.
The Most Important Lessons of All
Abby frequently chided me for going on long backcountry hikes alone, and this misadventure, for which I waited to attempt until someone was with me, adjudicated her caution.
Finally, let’s all remember the Prime Directive: no matter what, take care of my dog.
*This is an illustration. The chainsaw is not actually attached to the rifle.