Day 3425: Brain damage

Yesterday, at an urgent care clinic, a doctor tried to convince me to go to a hospital emergency room to get a CAT scan for possible brain damage.

My brain was surprised by this because I had come to the urgent care clinic suspecting wrist and ankle damage after taking a rather spectacular fall on my daily walk, which was preceded by this tweet:

I’m not showing any signs of brain damage there, am I?

Anyway, because I’m on the blood thinner Coumadin, almost immediately after the fall giant bruises were appearing at all the points of contact I’d had with the ground. My brain was undamaged enough to call my Coumadin nurse, Veronica, before everybody left for the long weekend. Veronica suggested I go to an urgent care clinic to see if the damage included any hairline fractures.

My son Aaron wanted to know if he should cancel our plans to go out to dinner with his friend Clark, who would be arriving soon, but I didn’t want to damage everyone’s evening, so I said “no.”

At the urgent care clinic, they x-rayed my left wrist, right wrist, and my right ankle and found no fractures. Even though I had walked the half-mile back home without pain, my right foot was now so sore that they gave me a walking boot. They said the ankle damage could be a sprain or just internal bleeding because of the Coumadin.

Then, just when I was thinking I had escaped serious damage, a doctor came in all concerned about brain damage and quoted this poem to me:

He bumped his head and went to bed,

And he couldn’t get up in the morning.

That got my brain’s attention, because I always want to get up in the morning. I thought the doctor was mainly concerned about brain damage because I had described hitting the side of my head very slightly in the fall, causing my glasses to fall off. However, she insisted that even if I hadn’t hit my head at all, any fall on Coumadin could cause brain damage and I should get at least one CAT scan, if not two.

I asked what the signs of brain damage would be and she said, “headaches, double vision, nausea, or change of personality.” Telling my son Aaron, his friend Clark, and my husband Michael to be on alert for any brain damage, we went out to dinner as planned and the only cat scan I got was this:

Because my brain is not so damaged that I take foolish risks, I contacted the on-call doctor at my hospital to see what they would suggest and, as I suspected, she was rather surprised about the Urgent Care doctor’s concern about brain damage and supported my decision not to worry about it. Believe me, my brain is damaged enough by worries without adding unnecessary ones at this point.

Do you see any evidence of brain damage in my other images for today?

It seems brain damaged to me that all of today’s National days involve eating dead cows. There seems to be too much brain damage in my country as I write this, and we better use our brains before it’s too late.

Because double vision is one of the signs of brain damage, here’s “Double Vision” by Foreigner.

If you see any evidence of brain damage in this post, please let me know in the comments section, below, and I’ll consider getting a CAT scan.

Thanks to all who help me write these daily posts with my brain and my heart, including YOU!