The Time I Fractured My Skull

 The Time I Fractured My Skull

Finn Clark

12/4/12

I got scared, and that’s where things went awry, I swung involuntarily and then let go and began falling. Upside down. I saw the sky, and my cousin with his curly mess of hair and a surprised look of concern and fright as I hit the ground,  then everything went black.

It was the summer of 2009, I was 10. I was visiting my father on the east coast and I was messing around with my cousins. Him, a couple of friends, and I were all dunking basketballs into a basketball hoop off of a 4 foot high ramp. The basketball hoop was a Spalding portable hoop that was all black and had a fiberglass backboard with the Nike and the NBA symbol on it. The ramp was old and flaking its baby barf green paint, it looked like a death trap waiting to happen. The other ramp across from this one already had a hole in it. Anyways, we all were dunking with having the hoop at an easy 8 feet, the limit any of us could go. I had to just be the one who pushed it.

“Move it up to 10 feet.” I said with great confidence as I thought this was going to be easy.

“You sure? That’s kinda high, I don’t think your going to make it.” One of my cousins said uncertainty.

“I’ll make it, just do it.”

He moved the hoop up to 10 feet, and suddenly I felt small. Like a lion compared to a mouse, but I would conquer this lion. I tried to not look scared or nervous but I knew they could see it in my face. I began running to jump off the ramp and when I realized I don’t have to do this, but I jumped anyway and I went up grabbed but found what I grabbed wasn’t the rim, it was the net.

Luckily I didn’t feel myself land or remember the excruciating pain, I don’t remember laying on the ground as my cousin rushed to get my dad, I don’t remember moaning or throwing up in the car on the way to the hospital, all I felt was darkness. What felt like darkness was actually two days, and during those two days I felt like I was sleeping, but without a dream, I was just waiting to be woken up. I went into a coma with a concussion AND a fractured skull. I woke up in a bed in a hospital and I became really confused on where I was and why I was there. The sterile smell was what surprised me the most, it was clean, too clean, when I was unconscious, it was the dirty, welcoming smell of plants and the outdoors, now, it smelled like nothingness.

When I woke up I heard cries of joy and was even more confused. Everything was white, the walls the machines, even the patients, I didn’t remember where I was or who these people around me were, but I was rushed to take an MRI, which is a body X-Ray device, and then I was on my way home. Funny thing was I didn’t even remember leaving. I just went to sleep and woke up in my grandmothers house. I thought it was all a dream, like most people would if they were me.

A couple of weeks later I go to get myself checked out to see if I could do anything like sports still and the doctor said absolutely, positively, no football, for the fear of my reopening my fracture. That’s when I got really scared.

“What about soccer?” I asked with fear in my voice.

“Of course, but your going to have to wait a little bit.” He said with not a trace of doubt.

“Awesome.”

I flew back to California and couldn’t wait to be with my family again. I get there and still can’t play any sports, that was kind of a let down, but hey I’m still alive aren’t I? After a while of just waiting to do things I still was let down of not playing any sports at all. I get a call from the doctors office to go there and get CT scan to see how my skull is doing with the recovery of not doing anything. It was boring for me but good for my skull.

I went and got the CT scan and I was doing a lot better than from where I started. The doctor said I was making a fast recovery and that anytime soon I could be playing sports, but no football. I was going back to school by then and was doing well, I remembered everything I learned from the previous year and my life was going to be back to normal from there on out and to think that all within a year I fractured my skull, was really close to becoming disabled, and then recovered. Sometimes I think to myself, I was very lucky to have survived.