0 comments Tuesday, April 22, 2008

So as many of you may know, I went to the E.R. on Sunday afternoon. I'm okay and the story that is to follow is by no means meant to be serious. Laugh at it and don't feel bad for doing it :)

Here's what happened:

It was a cool Saturday evening and the boys and I were finishing up leading kids in an event called Reality Check with Red Bank Baptist Church. The weekend was geared towards leading some small groups with younger kids but the evening activities were notorious for shenanigans happening. Of course, we love to keep traditions going.

We loaded up with water balloons at around 11:50pm on Saturday night. It was Josh Parrish, Tyson Ward, Reilly Liner, Kevin Brown, and myself. Reilly and I were completely decked out in camouflage with mud smeared on our face; you know...that Rambo effect. The plan was to freak the house of girls out and hopefully do as little damage as possible at the same time

With water balloons in hand, Reilly and I crept up to the house to get more accurate shots while Kevin, Tyson, and Josh sat back about 50 yards and shot balloons with a water balloon launcher.

As I made my move to flank the house from the back I started running, and that turned into a full out sprint. I threw my balloons and made a straight line to where the rest of the crew was. I spotted what appeared to be a hard covered top of some sort. Being that it was dark and I was running at full speed, I didn't have much time to process that this might not be what it appears.

*Right here is where I should have taken that time to asses the situation a little more, but being me, I chose not to*

I was going to cut the corner of this supposed hard top and make my way to the black abyss where the rest of the guys were hidden. I took one step on it and quickly realized that this was nothing other than a soft top covering for a pool. Great, I'm at a dead sprint and now having nothing to run on but water. Crap. At this point I slip and start a rapid downward fall towards the concrete siding. I then landed on the siding of the pool with my lower chest/upper abdomen....hard. I quickly got up and started uncontrollably gasping for air. Reilly saw my struggle and said "Dude, are you okay?" I wanted to come back with a cute reply like "No, I'm just holding my chest breathing really hard because I feel like I need to" but all I could do was point at my rib cage.

All of the above happened within about 3 seconds.

I then began taking deeper, controlled breaths and was able to slow it down to normal breathing soon enough. I figured I hadn't broken anything because of the lack of extreme pain, although it did hurt quite a bit.

The next morning sucked. I woke up with excruciating pain in my chest. I won't go into details, but there were certain signs that my insides might be messed up so I decided that after church I needed to go to the E.R. I checked myself in and waited around for a little until my name was called.

They checked me out, gave me a CAT Scan, and I waited. About an hour and a half went by where I was just chilling by myself in the room with an IV sticking out of my arm. The trauma team then came in and told me that 3 different doctors had looked at my CAT scan results and said that everything looked fine and that it was just bruised badly. They were still debating on keeping me overnight though, but after giving me his own check he decided it wasn't necessary.

Since I had been there for about 2 hours, and Tyson, being the bro that he is, was waiting for me in the Waiting Room, I asked the lady at the desk if someone could let him know that I was okay. She said that someone would bring him back here shortly. He came back and we chilled there for about another 30 minutes and still no one had come. ( I couldn't leave because I had an IV sticking out of my arm). So we started messing around with the bed and doing a little exploring.

After 4 hours of hanging out in the ER I was finally released and am going to be perfectly fine once the bruise heals on the inside.

Thank you to everyone who let me know they were thinking of me! It really is appreciated a ton!

Go ahead...laugh.

3 comments Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Well, as the semester is dying down, the time to sign up for next semesters classes is here.

Everyone looks forward to waking up at 5:50AM on the morning of their assigned sign up date. "Why would anyone want to wake up at that time?" You might ask. Well, they start at 6AM so your best chance is to wake up just before, enter all your class information and then go back to sleep in hopes of getting at least a little bit more sleep before having to wake up again to attend your morning class. It's great!

Mine went semi-smooth but as my luck has it, I ran into some problems.

In my preparation the day before I was figuring out what classes I needed to take and when I needed to take them in order to have an easy breezy schedule. I had pretty much run out of Gen. Ed. Classes to take and it was time to begin working on my classes for my major. My advisor suggested two 300 level classes and I gladly chose to take those as they sounded very interesting. So, 5:50AM rolls around and my alarm is going off, awesome. Nothing better than waking up to two of my alarms and two of Tyson's going off. I managed to get myself out of bed, start my computer, and log into the registration page. 6AM soon came and I began entering in all my information for the classes. Half asleep, I read a message that the system kicked back to me. It said " You do not have the required number of hours to take 300-400 level classes." Yeah! Awesome! Now, instead of having everything flow smoothly, I have to figure out what the heck is going on. It turns out that because I'm a Freshman, I can't take 300-400 level classes until I have at least 23 hours. I only have 15 until the end of the semester and my current classes are logged. Sweeeet.

The thing about it is, is that I need to have at least 12 hours per semester to be considered a full time student. Right now I'm only at 10.

Being that there was nothing I could do at the moment, I signed up for the rest of my classes and went back to sleep. I woke up a few hours later and checked out what else I could do. I find that I can also go get some forms, fill them out, and get them signed by both the instructor AND the department head to show that I are smart enough to take them thar smart kid classes. Pah.

Today I went and showed the forms to the intructors and department heads. I got into one with no problems. The second one, I didn't have such luck. The intstructor refused to sign it saying that she "wants to make sure that the seniors can get into it first" and to "come back next week if it's not full." Soooo, even though the Seniors have had more than ample time to sign up for this class, and I'm doing mine on time, I can't get into it? "Correct." Sweet, I'm just a Freshman and don't know what I'm talking about anyways. Lame.

Oh well, at least I'm now considered "full time" with a whopping 13 hours.