8-30-10
I was supposed to go into Chalate today to buy some materials for an upcoming HIV/AIDS charla I’m doing for the jovenes in my town. I also figured I’d take the time to update my blog, since I’ve been lazy and haven’t touched it since before I left for the States in the beginning of August. None of that happened though, since I almost managed to brain myself in my own front yard this morning before I left.
I was walking back to my front door from my outdoor faucet (my only source of running water) after brushing my teeth. To get to the faucet, I have to walk partway up the driveway I have. My driveway is set on an incline up to the road, and is made of this moss-grown, slippery-when-wet concrete that’s used everywhere here. (Which makes total sense, seeing as it rains for six months of the year here.) It’s seriously slick. Every time it’s been raining, and I need to walk down the road to my bus stop (which is made of the same concrete as my driveway, but is on a steeper incline), at least five people warn me that it’s bien liso (really slippery). It’s so dangerous even the Salvadorans are scared.
Now, I’ve discovered that the best way to avoid possible death on my driveway is to walk in the middle, which is laid with stones rather than concrete. For some reason, this morning, even though I knew it was wet from the night’s rain, I walked back down on the concrete. To compound the risk, I was wearing cheap, $5 Walmart flip-flops, which have all the traction of a pair of greased baking pans. Unsurprisingly, at the bottom of the driveway, my feet shot out from under me. Now, I’m not entirely certain how I managed this, but even though I remembered my butt hitting the ground first, it only seemed to slide me further, and I took all the impact on my upper back and my head. I didn’t even get a chance to throw my hands behind me to try to break my fall.
Slamming my back and head into the ground drove the wind from my lungs, along with one strangled cry I made before I couldn’t breathe. The first thing I thought, even as I was hitting the ground, was, “Shit. I’m going to the hospital for sure. There’s no way I can hit my head this hard and not have a concussion.” I mean, my head just slammed into the concrete. (I also had an image of my mom playing over and over in my head, from the time she chaperoned my high school French Club on our trip to Montreal. While we were ice skating on a half-melted rink, she fell and cracked her head hard enough to end up in a Canadian ER.) To give you an idea of how hard I hit the ground, let me just say that the impact knocked the glasses right off my face. It took me a minute to realize it, but when I did, I found them about six feet away from where I was lying.
Anyway, I lay on the ground for a few seconds, trying to draw a breath, even though it felt like someone knifed me in the back. When I was finally able to draw a few, shuttering breaths, I sat up and felt the back of my head. I was certain my hand was going to come away bloodied. The first thing I felt was something hard and flat tangled in my hair, and there was a split-second where I thought that I’d cracked my head so bad that a piece of my skull popped out, like it was a cheap jigsaw puzzle. The next second I grasped what an idiotic thought my first thought was, and realized that it was half of a plastic hair clip I had in my hair. By some miracle, my head hit the concrete exactly where the clip was, and it absorbed the first impact for me. No doubt I would’ve had a concussion if not for the hair clip.
I finally managed to get up and stagger back into my house like a drunken sailor. Thanks to some divine intervention, no one noticed my embarrassing fall except some roosters (yeah, they’re pretty much always around, hanging out in the background of my life here, like groupies). I figured pretty quickly that I didn’t have a concussion, since my back hurt a lot more than my head (I’m pretty sure I have a massive bruise forming, although since I can still breathe, presumably no broken bones). I even contemplated going to Chalate anyway, but then realized all I wanted to do was take some ibuprofen and rest my back in my hammock.
Moral of this story? Don’t wear flip-flops in El Salvador. Ever.
