Raser's Edge

Essay: On breaking my neck

Last Wednesday night, I broke my neck. Yes, you read that correctly.

About 10 p.m., while walking across the bedroom, I attempted to pick up my cat from between my feet. I immediately discovered that forward motion while bending over to reach for something between your feet activates the law of physics about bodies in motion and the law of gravity resulting in a precipitous lurch forward combined with downward motion causing sudden head contact with the hard wood floor and a broken neck. (Not to mention a banged-up forehead.)

That is a rather long and elaborate way of saying I did a really, really dumb thing.

Being a typical male, I refused, of course, to go to the Emergency Room despite my wife’s insistence that I should. However the next morning my neck pain was above ten on the Richter Scale so I finally listened to my wife and let her drive me to the ER on Amelia Island. Fortunately at 7:00 a.m. there was no one else and I was seen rather quickly.

The ER doctor informed me the CT scan showed the vertebrae at the base of my skull was fractured in two places and that I would be given an ambulance ride to the Baptist Medical Center ER in downtown Jacksonville. The neurosurgeon there would decide whether I would need surgery or not. So after four and a half hours in the local ER—involving a 15 minute CT scan and four hours and 15 minutes of waiting for results, assessment and the ambulance’s arrival--I was whisked off to Jacksonville.

I must admit the downtown ER was a disappointment. I had seen a couple episodes of ER on tv and expected doctors and nurses frantically running down the hall yelling things like, “Hit him with the defibrillator quick!” “Get more morphine!” “Stay with me… stay with me!” and the loud speaker booming, “Dr. Whizbangsky needed in surgery, stat!”

Of course, I could not see anything except the ceiling since I was flat on my back with my neck in a monstrous restraint, but I did not hear anything like that. It was actually pretty quiet.

In the ambulance I had this vision of arriving with the lights flashing and then being wheeled at high speed down the hallway, the lights blurring above me and the paramedics shouting, “Hurry up, call the neurosurgeon, we got a guy here with a broken neck!” Instead I was quietly rolled up against a wall and after ten minutes someone arrived and asked for my name, date of birth and what insurance did I have. Then she said, “Take him to room 42.” That was it. What a letdown. I thought ERs in downtown big cities were supposed to be exciting. So much for the credibility of tv shows.

There I was alone in this small room staring at the ceiling and listening to CNN on the wall tv. With the exception of a nurse taking a blood sample and someone coming in to say I might receive a customer service survey in a week or so, nothing happened. Then after three hours the nurse came in and said the surgeon saw the CT scan and said I could sit up 45 degrees and put on a smaller neck brace which was great news since my back was hurting worse than the neck after several hours lying flat on the uncomfortable gurney.

“How soon will the surgeon get here?” I asked.

“Oh, could take a couple hours,” the nurse replied and left

By now, of course, I realized my broken neck was not much of an emergency.

Finally, the surgeon’s assistant came in, told me the fracture was “stable” (whatever that means) and I could go home. After another hour getting instructions on applying ice packs, the medications I would have to take, and how to wear the neck brace, they extracted the IV from my arm, the discharge papers were processed and I was allowed to leave.

That was it. Poof! Breaking your neck and going to the Emergency Room is really not very exciting. Painful, yes, boring, yes, exciting, no. I suggest you do all you can to avoid it.

I’m sure you have heard the stories about the dog and the homework and the butler and the murder. So now if somebody asks me, “How did you break your neck?” I’ll reply, “The cat did it!”