Scrapbooking a fractured skull

The first scrapbook I ever completed happened because of the most traumatic event of my young life.

I was nine years old and flirting with my best friend Loyal at his house. He grabbed his older brother’s golf bag and we both headed out into the vacant lot behind his apartment complex. Pulling the largest club out of the bag, he lifted the ball up and hit it. I have no idea if he hit the ball, but he clearly connected with my forehead on the follow through. I will never forget the sound of the impact.

Nothing like that had crossed my mind before.

Skull fractured and bleeding profusely, I slammed the flat of my hand into the open crater in my head and ran for the back door of her apartment screaming, leaving a trail of blood in my wake. Her mother Doris and my sister, responding to the screams of agony, met me at the door. When I withdrew my hand to show them both what had happened, I knew I was in trouble from the look on her faces.

Since my mother had just left town for a conference and my father was still at work, my sister and I were under orders to go directly to Loyal’s house after school so as not to get in trouble.

That worked fine.

So Doris grabbed a washcloth, put it on my head, and put me in the backseat of her car with my head on Sis’s lap. With the shotgun mounted on Loyal, Doris headed for the nearest hospital.

Then it got really interesting.

When I got to the hospital, they were kind enough to put a temporary bandage on the hole in my forehead, but they refused to admit me because no one thought to write a note for Doris to give her permission to treat life-threatening head injuries. in case both parents. they were not available.

Since Mom was out of town at the conference (by the way, this was the first day of her absence), everyone was busy trying to find Dad so he could authorize treatment. Normally he would have been coming home from work, except he decided to buy some new tires on the way home.

Did I tell you this was in 1969, before cell phones?

Still conscious and alert, my biggest fear was receiving stitches. But no one was listening to my pleas of “Just put a Band-Aid on it!”

The hospital staff asked who my pediatrician was, and believe it or not, I found out it was Dr. Johnson. When they contacted him by phone and he found out about the situation, he said to take me to another hospital where he worked and he would accept the responsibility of treating me. So we got back in the car and headed to St. Francis Hospital, another 20 minutes away.

Still preoccupied with the pain of receiving stitches (what did I know? I was only nine), I remember being taken to a room, put on some funky hospital pajamas, and crawled into a bed. No ER like the one you see on TV today.

They gave me something to knock me out because the next thing I remember was waking up the next morning and eating Jell-O.

I ate a lot of jelly that week. In fact, I got really tired of Jello. Get me a hot dog or some pizza, please. No, here’s a little more jelly.

Later they told me that they called a plastic surgeon to fix my forehead as best he could. And the next time I looked in the mirror, a quarter of my head was shaved and, yes, you guessed it, eight of the biggest, baddest, ugliest black stitches you’ve ever seen, from hairline to eyebrow. over my left eye. And they didn’t hurt one bit.

To help me pass the time, Doris brought me a scrapbook with a faux leather cover and gold lettering that read “Scrapbook.” Inside, a nice half-inch stack of tan pages to decorate however you like.

Doris had saved the blood-soaked temporary bandage from the first visit to the hospital. So that’s what I put on page one, along with a hair clipping and my plastic hospital ID bracelet. I thought it was the coolest page ever.

Would you believe that no one took a picture of me? Not one! So the rest of the scrapbook is filled with cards, letters, and pictures that I drew. What a boring week. Nov!

Besides having suffered the worst childhood injury of all my siblings, there was one other thing that makes this story immortal in the annals of family history.

Dad didn’t tell Mom about the incident until she came home from the conference three days later. His reasoning was that he didn’t want her to worry. When he met her at the train station, she asked him how everything had gone. Always ready for understatement, her response was, “There’s been a little mishap. Paul’s in the hospital.”

She never forgave him for that.

I never questioned where mom was during those three days. She knew that she was out of town at a conference. But when she walked into my hospital room on Thursday when she came back, I burst into tears of joy to see her again.

I never fully understood the severity of the injury until I got much older. If the impact of the golf club had been an inch lower, my eyeball would have exploded. Two more inches around the skull would have been a direct hit to the left temple and probable death.

Although it has faded after 41 years, the scar is still visible, as is the tooth left in the skull. And I still have that scrapbook with the bloody bandage on the first page.