The Third Thing

 

Last Thursday afternoon I started to take my dog out for a walk. We went down the driveway and headed for the curb to cross the street.

 

The next thing I knew I was waking up in an ambulance, with EMTs surrounding me.

 

Strangely, I don’t remember being surprised or scared. I seemed to accept where I was. The EMT told me I had fallen in the street. I asked where my dog was; he said they’d put her back in the house. Then I asked who had called them. A passerby, they said. They told me they were taking me to the hospital, and I accepted that. I was able to give them my name and address, and presumably my husband’s phone number at work, as they were calling him.

 

But I had absolutely no memory of having fallen.

 

I was given at CT scan at the hospital, which was negative. I had a bump and a cut on my head that took a couple of stitches, a cut on my inner lip, and a chip off my front tooth. I was told I have a concussion. I’ve been resting the past few days and avoiding going out because I look the bride of Frankenstein. If this were Halloween, I’d be all set to scare the kiddies.

 

But it’s a scary thing to think about. I’ve never lost consciousness before in my life, and to have no memory at all of what happened is really disturbing. (I keep asking my dog, the only witness, but she isn’t talking.) I felt fine when we left the house. I wasn’t dizzy or lightheaded at all. The last thing I remember thinking is planning to cross the street in front of my house. There’s been road work going on on our street for months, and the pavement is uneven. There’s a sort of pipe sticking up near the curb. Maybe I tripped over something. Maybe Honey suddenly spotted a squirrel and bolted, pulling me off my feet. Maybe a lot of things…I guess I’ll never know.

 

I have an appointment with my own doctor on Tuesday to have the stitches removed. I’ll tell him the story and see if he thinks I need follow-up. In the meantime I don’t feel too bad; ibuprofen helps for what pain I have, though it isn’t much, and I can only wait for the purple-and-red around my eye to fade. In the meantime, though, I’m going to avoid going out in public if at all possible.

 

One good thing to come out of this, I guess: I think I’ve lost my aversion to cell phones. If whoever saw me in the street hadn’t had one, I’d have been lying there longer. Maybe I’ll even start carrying my little TracPhone with me now when I go out.

 

They say bad things come in threes. If that’s true, I should be safe for a while now. My mother’s death, the virus from hell that hung on for three weeks, and now this. It’s been quite a month.