David's Musings, a Brit in the Bay

I’m currently convalescing after a very bad accident at home. Last Tuesday evening, I fell asleep in a hot bath and woke too suddenly. I got up, took one pace in the bathroom and then completely blacked out. I woke to find myself on the floor being comforted by my wife with blood everywhere. Sara told me not to panic - so I immediately panicked. It transpires that as I passed out, I fell, hitting my head on the side of the marble bath on the way down – not doing anything to brace for the fall at all.

I spent Tuesday night into Wednesday morning at Stanford ER. I have got nothing but great things to say about the staff there. I ended up on strong painkillers (hyrdomorphone), a severely cut lip from the mouth up to the nose (with many internal and external stitches), a cut nose, and, after a few CT scans they found a fractured eye socket and a fracture just below my eye.

Looking back, I do feel a little lucky that I didn’t do more severe damage, knock my teeth out, break my nose, take my eye out, do more damage to my eye socket, or anything else. Nearly a week on, I still feel pretty ropey, do not have much feeling in my face, but am slowly getting better. I got confirmation yesterday from the hospital they do not need to operate on my eye socket (as is sometime the case with these injuries), so that’s good news. Also, most of the swelling has subsided.

The ironic thing is that I have so much time to kill, but I have no interest to do much. Cabin fever set in about four days ago.

Word of warning. Don’t have a very hot bath, wake up and stand up too quickly! Bathrooms are dangerous!