Throw Back Thursday: 8th Grade Concussion

So, I was thinking about how everyone posts #TBT pictures online and I thought, hey, bloggers could do that too!  Tell a quick short story from their past!  It makes for a blog post, a little different than usual, and it’s a chance to share a little more about yourself and maybe make for a fun story.  Not that having a concussion is fun.  It’s not.

Here’s what happened.

I went to a small combined middle/high school.  In six grades, there were about 300 kids.  All six years, I played the flute in band.  I was a HUGE band geek.

In 8th grade, band just happened to be the same hour as PE, so we got our own PE hour.  It was kind of awesome.  We made up games and basically got to do whatever we wanted.  One day, we decided that we were going to play tag.

Now I don’t like tag for a number of reasons.  I don’t like running.  I don’t like being chased.  I don’t like having to chase other people.  I don’t at all like the concept of being “it.”  But I agreed to play nevertheless.

Long story short, I ended up tripping over my friend’s shoe and hurtling into the steps of the bleachers.  I remember tripping and I remember falling.  I don’t remember hitting.  After falling, the next thing I knew was that everything was dark and everyone’s voices sounded really far away.

Shortly thereafter, after I’d gotten up and my glasses were back on my face (they’d flown off… fortunately they didn’t break), my friends helped me back to the locker room.  I thought I was okay, but then, my vision erupted into these weird fuzzy grey specks.  It freaked me out so one of my teachers escorted me to the nurse.

I thought I was getting better at the time, but as it turned out, the nurse couldn’t understand what I was saying.  She called my mom and told her I had hit my head running into the “picture.” When my mom arrived to pick me up, she said I looked dazed and that my eyes were completely glazed over.

She drove me immediately to the doctor’s office, where I was escorted to a back room.  It was only then that I realized how incredibly nauseated I felt.  I have no idea why head injuries cause nausea, but I was miserable.

The doctor sent me home with instructions for my mom to check on me throughout the night, just in case.  By that point, I was feeling better, but I still had to take it easy.

The next morning, I was shocked to wake up and discover the entire right side of my face was purple, and I do mean purple.  Even my eye was bruised which, if you’ve never experienced it, is really gross and really weird.  Years later, I discovered I actually have a scar on my eyeball from the impact.  But it looked like I’d taken a purple marker and just colored over the entire right side of my face.  It was like a Phantom of the Opera bruise mask.  I wish I’d taken a picture of it, because it looked pretty bad-a.

So yeah, that’s my Throw Back Thursday concussion story.  What’s your TBT?