FLIRTING WITH DEATH – TWICE!

Part 1. Dumbassery

My body lay crumpled on the driveway. I couldn’t tell what I’d broke, but I knew this wasn’t good.

“Wayne, you really did it this time,” I said to myself, as if I were talking to someone else’s body.

I’d slipped and fallen backwards off the wall edging our driveway, while pitchforking yard waste into our trash trailer below. I bounced off some cement blocks that came along for the five-foot ride, the top of my head crashing onto the pebbled pavement. My bald head gushed blood. “Like a stuck pig,” I thought. A gash on the top of my nose also was flowing red. The inside of my ring finger was slashed open to the bone. Both big toes felt smashed. I’d barely missed hitting the tongue of the trailer. My biggest fear, though, was the pain in my upper back.

That’s a lie. My biggest fear was having my wife see me in this condition, covered in blood, sweat, and dirt. “It could give her a heart attack,” I reasoned, finally staggering to my feet.

I reached for my glasses. They lay atop a clod of dirt, completely safe, even though, as I’d later learn, a nosepad had dented my noggin. I retrieved one AirPod, still in an ear, and found the other, undamaged, on the ground.

Here’s the thing. If Eva would have happened to look out the window of her second-floor office, she could have watched my entire acrobatics. But, thankfully, she missed the show since she was teaching a class online.

I walked/shuffled as best I could into the house and up the stairs to the shower, trying to avoid leaving too obvious a blood trail. Like I was a wounded deer fearful of being tracked, or some damned thing.

The shower spray stung my wounds where I had expected, and revealed other abrasions. “Yep, you really did it this time,” I unnecessarily repeated to myself.

Now in bed, the pillow and sheets staining red, I texted Eva:

(Tue, May 27at 4:04PM) As soon as you can wrap up, I’m in need of some serious nursing.

A few minutes later, I realized my message likely underplayed my situation, so I sent a second:

In bedroom. Bad fall.

In moments, my rescue nurse appeared. “What did you…” she started, but I cut her off.

“There’s no way to sugar-coat this. It’s bad.” I could see the seriousness was hitting her. I said, “I need you to hold it together. We need to figure out what to do…” and told her of my accident.

“I’m trying really hard not to lose my shit,” she said.

“That wouldn’t be helpful.”

Perhaps the best way to understand Eva’s perspective on the moment is to share the text she sent our daughter a bit later:

Well… so taking dad to the ER. He just fell off the motherfucking wall and landed on his motherfucking head. He didn’t get knocked out, big cut on his head, hurt his back/neck, prob needs stitches in his finger and on his nose… bloody fucking mess! God damn it!

Indeed. For just five weeks earlier, out of the blue, I’d had seizure from a brain hematoma, and the number one rule that Eva had drummed into my head (so to speak) was to not hit my head on anything. I’ll get back to that first near-death experience later, but I suppose it’s understandable why her response was equally worried and pissed off at me.

We headed to the local ER, and I couldn’t really argue. I did share one thought, “If it wasn’t for this gash in my finger, I might have wanted to try to such ride this out and see what happens.” I think Eva actually laughed at that point.

(My hesitation about not treating the slice of my ring finger had some history. In a much earlier life, I’d sewed up a similar gash on my shin with fishing line and a needle. It didn’t end well, as I tell elsewhere in “God Sends Maggots,” in Schmidt’s Shorts: Stories to Make You Smile.)

We made it to the ER, where I grabbed the first wheelchair I saw. They gave me a just-in-case neck brace. Then all the usual hospital stuff – CT scans, poking and squeezing, stitching up my scalp and hand. After the needles in my head, though, I wouldn’t let the doc sew up my nose. I told him, “No, I want a scar on my nose. To remind me what a dumbass I was.”

Afterwards, as a reward for… something, Eva took me to Carl’s Jr. But the first thing I did when home and settled into my recliner was stick my numbed-up, stitched-up, wrapped finger into the ketchup. I cleaned out the gap at the end of my splint by poking a fry into its opening.

It was starting to hit me. I no longer can trust my body the way I used to.

Part 2. The seizure I can’t remember

My seizure had hit me the night before Easter five weeks earlier. The evening had been nothing unusual – dinner at home, binging on Netflix. The last thing I remember, in my early half-sleep, was being aware that I was nauseous and having a hard time separating my dreaming from reality. “How odd,” I had thought. And then – out.

As Eva related to me later, since I have zero memory of any of it, is that I got up after midnight to pee, then seemed to lose my way back in the darkness. When I let out a yell from the adjacent sitting room, Eva jumped up. I went rigid, collapsed to the floor, and had a grand mal seizure. “It seemed to go on forever,” she recounted, but figured it lasted 30-45 seconds.

After calling 911, she realized, “Shit, I’ve got to get some clothes on.” Somehow, she managed to do that for both of us, as well as drag my dead weight away from the door so the EMT guys could deal with me, hauling my sorry ass on a chair-gurney down our narrow stairs to the ambulance.

Apparently, I couldn’t stop asking, “What’s going on?” but wasn’t processing their answers. In the hospital, I kept proclaiming, “What the fuck? I am so-o sorry.”

And then, in the middle of all this, I got the hiccups that just wouldn’t quit, making it very difficult to get an MRI. But they managed, and released me the following day, hiccups and all.

A blinding headache the next day sent me to the local ER. A dose of fentanyl fixed my headache, and a spoonful of peanut butter killed my hiccups. My new CT, however, appeared “worrisome,” so that meant back to the ER in Eugene, where I got my fourth CT scan, which apparently resolved the experts' worries. We headed home in the dark on Tuesday. As for my own memories of those three-and-a-half days, it’s like they all got deleted permanently from my brain’s hard drive.

I was barred from driving (or solo bike riding) for three months, so I took to regular walks. I was on the mend. Getting back to normal. Yard work. Like loading the pile of yard debris into my trash trailer. Done it dozens of times.

Then, BAM! Life changed forever.

Part 3. What happened?

After my fall, that last CT of my head showed that the hematoma that caused my earlier seizure had disappeared. So I don’t think that caused my fall. It was just my dumbassery, not being as careful as my old age warranted.

But what caused my hematoma in the first place?

I do have a reputation for banging my head into things. You name it; I’ve whacked my head on it. Cabinets, tree limbs, tools. But it was Eva’s new Mercedes SUV that I blame. It is a beautiful work of German engineering. However, when a while back I inadvertently hit the tailgate button when bending down to unload groceries, it swung down and smacked the back of my head along the way, knocking me to the ground, and nearly knocking me out.

I’ve often found her car unnecessarily complicated. For example, we just discovered that if you manually turn off the headlights, the parking lights on (just) the left side stay on. Something about parking safety regulations in Germany. You can leave the highlight set to “auto” to disable that. They need an owners manual for American dummies version.

I suspect that those Mercedes engineers would find some way to blame me for getting smacked by their tailgate: dumnkopf Amerikaner! As I’ve often said about her car’s various idiosyncrasies: fucking Germans!

Part 4. My guardian angel – Jerome

Flirting with death twice in five weeks has focused my mind. I’m slowly recovering. I’m a lot more careful – about everything. Some pieces of me will never be the same. Yet, as I’ve realized, there are so many ways this could have been way worse.

After my second stint in the hospital, I shared my incident in an email with a few friends.

One replied:

Waaaayyyyynnnnne! You are ridiculous!  Glad you're okay.  And I can't believe an atheist ends up with such a busy Guardian Angel saving his sorry ASSS  over and over!🤣🤣

I wrote back:

His name is Jerome and I’m not happy with his work. I think he has ADD. Some angel. But I’ll be skipping the risky Grand Canyon hikes this year. Maybe that was his intention all along.

Before I sent it, I thought, “Jerome? Why Jerome? Where did that name come from?”

The only Jerome I’ve ever known was Jerome Ringo, a larger-than-life Black man from Lake Charles, Louisiana, who was Board Chair of the National Wildlife Federation back when I worked there. I hadn’t given him two thoughts since those years. But the name, Jerome, seemed as good as any for a Guardian Angel.

Then, just a few days after that private exchange, I got an email, out of the blue, from a former NWF colleague, with a link to The New York Times obituary for Jerome, who had died a month earlier. A devoutly religious man, he surely thought he was headed for Heaven.

If Jerome really is my Guardian Angel now, was he just distracted when I fell on my head? Or had he let me fall as a lesson to be more careful? I came up with a third possibility: revenge.

Twenty years ago, when he became NWF’s Board of Directors Chair, I was NWF’s Communications Vice President. That put me in charge of the group’s annual meetings, where hundreds of delegates gathered to debate and set conservation policies for the group. My job included writing Jerome’s speech for the event, which in 2005 was being held in Washington, DC, in a hotel near Dupont Circle. I had in my pocket the final version of his afternoon speech, the one where he introduces himself as the new Board Chair. Around noon, I realized I had a couple of hours when I could sneak away to visit the Phillips Collection art gallery, which to that point I’d never visited. I went back to my room, got really stoned, and walked over to the gallery.

Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party” was as wonderful as I’d imagined. But, wouldn’t you know, time got away from me. I made it back to the annual meeting just as Jerome was being introduced to give his speech. He was trying to control his panic and was not happy with me. (He did fine on his speech.) So fast-forward to Heaven, was my fall Jerome’s payback? I’m just sayin’…

No, I believe none of that. But I also know that our Universe is a strange place. And having two brushes with death this spring has given me plenty to think about. I’ve updated my will. Added that I want my ashes dumped in the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.

Speaking of which, I’ll be rafting through it, departing July 5, the day after my 79^th birthday. It will be my tenth time. Plus, we already have a charter reserved for 2026. For so long as I’m conscious, I’ll always have one last trip through the Grand Canyon awaiting.

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