Sunday, November 26, 2006

Turkey Bowl Gone Bad

There is nothing Bill looks forward to more than the Turkey Bowl, otherwise known as the Thanksgiving Day morning football game thrown together by members of the Elder's Quorum. He wakes up early every Thanksgiving Day, ready to catch some passes, knock some guys down, and maybe score a touchdown (which he had 4).

Last Thursday started out like all the others. He was gone for a few hours, and when he came home, I asked him if he had fun.

"Yeah, I guess. I think I broke a guy's cheekbone, though."

"What?!" I asked. He proceeded to tell me about a play in which he went to catch the ball that was being thrown to him, and a guy from the other team tried to intercept it.

Just as Bill felt the ball touch his fingertips, he felt an explosion of pain on the side of his head, heard a loud CRACK and blacked out, only for a second. When he came to, he was on the ground, face down. When he cleared his head and realized he was "okay" (and by that I mean no blood, no broken bones, no obvious injuries) his focus turned to the other guy.

The other guy had no cheekbone. The right side of his face was caved in. His nose was bleeding, and he looked pretty bad. He left immediately, and Bill played the rest of the game feeling horrible, not because of the raging headache he now had, but because he was pretty sure he had just been the cause of this guy having to spend Thanksgiving Day in the hospital.


All day we speculated about how the other guy was doing, to what extent the damage was, if he was in surgery yet or not. (We didn't know the guy. Bill played with 8th ward, and it was a guy in 8th ward's brother-in-law from out of town.)

Bill had so much guilt about the fact that all he had was a slightly red cheek and a small red dot on the white of his eye where he had obviously burst a blood vessel. And of course, the pounding head. I watched him closely, worried that the worst of it was going on somewhere we couldn't see. (I've watched way too many episodes of ER and Grey's Anatomy where people come in with head trauma and think they're totally fine, only to find out they're bleeding on the brain and suddenly their life is hanging by a thread.) He was nervous to take a nap, but of course he had to, he was so exhausted and in pain. I checked on him every so often to make sure he was breathing and, you know, not seizing or something.

Well, the next day Bill wakes up with the headache still, but we're pretty certain he's okay. We head to Yakima to visit his family, and at about 7:00 in the evening, my brother-in-law John, calls and says that the sister of the guy who Bill had collided with (his sister and her husband are in 8th ward, so John knew them) had called John and told him to what extent he was injured.

Bill's head had managed to break not only the guy's cheekbone, but also his eye socket bone and sinus bone. Tomorrow he goes in for a consult for reconstructive surgery.

We could hardly believe it. Bill felt sick. Fortunately, this guy seems like the nicest man on the planet. He told his sister to tell Bill how sorry he was (!) and to make sure Bill was okay, that he knew it was his fault, for going in for the interception.

His sister sent us several pictures of him, including his catscan, which is, needless to say, a little disturbing. You can see every broken bone, and it shows where the whole side of his face is filled with blood, where it shouldn't be. (It's black and white, but she explained what we were looking at.) The whole side of his face is completely distorted, and he has no white to his left eye. It is blood red. I wanted so badly to post the pictures on here, but the stupid blogger site wouldn't let me, I don't know what the problem is. If anyone would like to see them, I can e-mail them to you. They're a little graphic, but not too bad.

So, 4 days later, Bill still has a bad headache (which worries me), but more than that he has a lot of guilt. He is calling the guy today to see how he's doing and apologize and all that good stuff.

So, the lesson here is, don't mess with Bill or he'll bash your face in.

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