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.

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