So what happened to me on Friday the 6th of March?
As so many of these tales unravel it all started with alcohol. I’d been invited out by Claire for her brother Neils fiancé Alices birthday drinks do. This is only the second time I’ve met Alice, the first time at their engagement party. I’ve known Neil for a while as he used to work at the same company I’m at now.
At any rate over the course of the night quite a few drinks where consumed.
Towards the end of the evening, one or two people had started to go home, I felt a bit dizzy quite rapidly. Normally I get a slowly increasing buzz which I know well and use as a good indicator of when to stop drinking. I made my way to the toilets to get some water on my face, unfortunately there was a queue of people coming out of the toilets, so I decided to go back up the spiral staircase to get some air instead. The next couple of events are bit more patchy. I recall standing under the staircase, possibly letting some people past, something also makes me think I might have sat down under the stairs, maybe I was waiting to get into the toilets to splash my face. Things just sort of get a bit black and hazy from there.
The next thing I remember is seeing Claire and the woman from the coat desk standing over me. Claire was pressing some blue paper towels to my forehead. I don’t specifically recall the first couple of questions but they were along the lines of “are you alright” and “how many fingers am I holding up”. Then we came to the slightly more tricky questions of did I remember what happened. As you can probably guess at this point, I wasn’t completely sure. I’d apparently been unconscious for a minute or so as well.
After a few minutes the ambulance “drunk bus” arrived, and the paramedics had a look over me, took my blood pressure, checked my blood sugar and took my details. They said the wound seemed superficial but that someone should keep an eye on me and asked if I’d come with anyone else, I said no and that I’d met up with every body at the bar. Once they’d finished collecting my details the paramedic and I wandered back over to my friends and told them that I should be alright but that someone should keep an eye on me over night as it could be worse than it looked. If I started having blurred vision or started vomiting I should be taken to hospital to be checked out fully.
Everyone came back out of the bar a few minutes later to decide what to do next, I think the party was winding down so most opted to return home. So we said farewell to each other amidst various Harry Potter comments. Claire offered to take me back to her house and keep an eye on me so we headed off in the direction of the tube. On the way back, before we caught the tube, she checked with one of her house mates that was away for the weekend to see if I could sleep in their bed for the night. Fortunately the tube is quite direct though the whole time I was wishing I had a hat to cover up my stupid forehead. When we got off the tube we had a rather pleasant walk to her house, it was good to chat without the noise of the bar.
When we got to her house Claire stuck some bandages to my forehead and chin so that I wouldn’t bleed all over her house mates pillow. We each then went to bed, as I couldn’t quite sleep yet I posted a picture on twitter and then answered a few questions about it before finally putting head down to sleep.
Around eight in the morning I woke up and checked my bandages, it was good having them there as my chin had bled a bit during the night. I left them in place and then lay back down in the bed for a bit to rest and run through the evening. After a little while I checked the internet to find some tips on speeding up the healing process. Vitamin C, Zinc and protein all seemed like best things to get, so I decided that I’d have a fry up with Orange Juice when I got home. The best hangover cure if ever there was one. A tasty multivitamin can follow that up for the Zinc. I also did some “Brain Training” as I figured it might help.
Some time later I got up again and carefully remove the bandages from my face, I managed to loosen the scab on my chin from the bandage with water so I didn’t tear it all off. At the same time I noticed some abrasions on the side of my face, quite shallow though and they’d scabbed up pretty quickly by the looks of things, a bit swollen though.
Around 9.30 Claire came down to check on me, by this time I was feeling reasonably well, as she needed to pack up to go to a ball in the evening I decided I would make my way back home. She gave me some directions back to the tube station and I remembered most of it from the walk the opposite direction the night before.
I got a couple of strange looks from people on the tube but mainly I kept my head down to avoid everyone. When I got back to Mile End I went into the new Tesco got my fry up supplies and some plasters. Then I had a nice big fry up when I got back to my flat.
Later that day I discovered a couple other party injuries, a decent sized but shallow cut on my shoulder and a skinned and bruised knee. None of it, bar the knee, is giving me any real pain and I’ve not had any dizziness or vomiting since the event.
So what actually happened?
Well the best I can piece together is that my head collided with the spiral staircase by the toilets, though its difficult to work out exactly how I got the gash I did from that. The cut on my chin did swell up a little but, but as I’ve no pain in my jaw I don’t think I hit it very hard at all. I’ve also no neck pains so I don’t think I fell down the stairs at all. I suppose its possible that I just stood up into the edge of a stair, that would probably explain the vertical nature of the gash though its not a straight wound.
But I wanna see a picture!!!
Ok fine, Jason took a pretty good one of it the other night. Fortunately its healing up reasonably well, so with any luck it should be faded in a week or two.
