It was 25 years ago today – December 23, 1998 – that I fell on the ice and suffered a severe brain bleed that put me in the hospital for a couple of days, cost me my sense of smell (which I have since only partially recovered), and caused me severe head pain for a year or more.
It was around 8:30 that morning. I had just gotten off the phone with my brother-in-law, Palmer McCown. (I have no idea what we talked about that early in the morning!) There had been an ice storm in the DFW area the night before, and there was a thick covering of ice on the ground. I foolishly went out to get the newspaper.
The last thing I remember is losing my balance. My next conscious moment was finding myself on the floor of our living room, looking up into the eyes of Joanna and the kids. It turns out that Joanna started wondering where I was, noticed the front door was open, and saw me sitting on the steps down by the sidewalk. Somehow, she got to me without falling (thank God) and gingerly walked me inside. I remember none of that – I lost time, at least 20-30 minutes.
Joanna called our family doctor, who told her to bring me in immediately. By the time we walked into his office, the front of my face was all black – filled with blood. The back of my head had hit the icy pavement, shoving my brain to the front of my skull and causing the brain bleed. When Dr. Wien saw me, he told Joanna to get me to the ER immediately, so we drove to Plano Medical Center, where I was admitted.
I was there for two days. I don’t remember much of that hospital stay. However, I do remember a nurse coming to take my vital signs late on the second night. She asked me what day it was. I looked up at the clock on the wall facing my bed; it read 11:30. I replied, “Well, in a half-hour, it will be Christmas.” I was right, and that was good news to the nurse – early signs of recovery.
Hard to believe, but they released me the next afternoon – Christmas afternoon – and Joanna took me home. For the next month, my head pain was severe, and I did nothing but lie in bed. Joanna put sheets up on the bedroom windows to keep out the sunlight. My eyes were very sensitive to the light.
On my initial trips to the neurologist the first few weeks after my fall, he would always ask me whether my sense of smell or taste had been affected. Well, I really hadn’t paid attention to those things – besides, I was spending most of my time in bed, so there was nothing much to smell. So I kept telling him no, that they hadn’t been affected. You don’t miss what you don’t notice.
Then one day, probably a month or so after my fall, we took our dog to the vet for his annual examination. All four of us were in the car on the way home, and everybody was complaining about how awful Dusty smelled. I thought, “Hmmm, I don’t smell anything. What are they talking about?”
So that night, for some reason, everyone was out, and I was by myself. I got curious, went into the bathroom, and took down one of my aftershave lotions and took a whiff – NOTHING! So then I went into the kitchen and took a whiff of a couple of Joanna’s spices – NOTHING!
So the next time we went to the neurologist, I told him that apparently my sense of smell had been affected. He then tested me – which he should have done in the first place – by taking a cotton swab, dabbing it into something, and placing it on the back of my tongue. Then he asked, “What do you taste?” I told him I didn’t taste anything. He said, “That was garlic.”
So yes, I had lost my sense of smell – and apparently some sense of taste as well. He explained that the olfactory nerves in my brain – which give you your sense of smell – had been “sheared off” by the collision of my brain with my skull during the fall. Over the years, I seem to have regained some smells but not all. Fortunately, most of those I have regained are pleasant ones – citrus, barbecue, etc.
As far as my sense of taste, garlic seems to be an outlier. There’s only one other thing for which I’ve noticed a change in my sense of taste – Dr. Pepper. I used to love drinking Dr. Pepper. Since the fall, I haven’t been able to stand it – it now has a bitter taste.
Joanna didn’t mind at all that I could no longer taste garlic. She was a consummate cook, and she loved to cook with garlic. However, before my fall, she had to limit it because of my “distaste” for it. I hated it! After my fall, she could add garlic to anything – to her heart’s content – and not worry about me complaining!
I was not permitted to drive for the first 5 months or so after my fall, so Joanna had to drive me everywhere. Also, I had always done the laundry (this is something I had even done for my parents when I was growing up – going to the laundromat on Saturday afternoons allowed me to sit and read my sports magazines, etc., without being summoned to do chores around the house). Well, during those first few months after my fall, I was unable to do anything, so Joanna had to do the laundry – she hated it! She was so glad when I had recovered enough to resume my responsibilities around the house. She was relieved when I could start driving again, too!
Since 1990, I had worked part-time (while getting the kids to and from school, etc.) as a technical editor for an environmental management company. In March 1999, after I had been unable to work for a couple of months because of my injury, they laid me off. This led to a surprising burst of activity in the late spring and then the summer, as I wrote 45,000 words of a political novel of which I had conceived years earlier.
As I recovered, I began interviewing for jobs, and in October I got a new technical writing/editing job with a documentation firm. That stopped my activity on the novel. It was only this past summer of 2023 that I finally resumed work on that novel – which had sat on my computer, virtually untouched, for almost 24 years.
Though the severity of my head pain lessened after a couple of months or so, I continued to have what I called “twinges” of head pain for at least a year, probably more, after the fall.
I should note how thankful I am that Joanna was off work that day from her job as a financial analyst for ExxonMobil. The kids were home from school for Christmas vacation, but they would have slept in. If Joanna hadn’t been home, I probably wouldn’t have been found until it was too late – considering the severity of my brain bleed. The neighbors, I’m sure, were being smart and staying inside, so I doubt that anyone would have seen me. Thanks be to God for Joanna being home that day.
By the way, I learned my lesson – I have never, since that day, gone out to get the newspaper when there’s ice – or even snow – on the ground. Of course, with the newspapers on my phone these days, that’s not such a temptation anymore!