By: Walter Little, Jr.

I'll admit that MaryLou (my wife) and I aren't exactly “Friday night party animals,” but last Friday night definitely WAS NOT my favorite Friday night because most of it was spent in the Emergency Room (ER) at Crawford Long Hospital. Allow me to backtrack and my story will make more sense. Since two days prior I had been plagued by the “Hershey runs” and after they had finally stopped I felt well enough to make my way to my desk and do some work on an article I'm writing on Autism. Well. . .I had been working a couple of hours and decided that I needed to get something to drink, so I saved my work and got up and headed toward the kitchen. I made maybe two steps and was hit by that feeling of “oh crud. . .I'm passing out” and the next thing I knew my face was planted in the carpet. I took about thirty (30) seconds to asess my condition and once I was sure there were no broken bones (later confirmed by x-rays) and only minor bleeding from a cut on my lip, I proceeded to pick my self up from the floor.

Okay. . .fast forward to the ER. Since it had been more or less established that I had blacked-out, I didn't have to wait. . .I was taken straight back and placed in a room where it looked like I was being wired to transmit an HD television signal. Over the next three or four hours I had two (2) EKGs (a standard six-lead monitored at the nurse's station plus a more detailed 12-lead), a CT scan of my head, an x-ray of my right elbow and a chest x-ray. Once they decided that my fainting spell was the result of nothing more diabolical than the effects of dehydration causing my blood pressure to bottom out when I got up to walk to the kitchen. There was one light spot during my evening at the hospital. A short time after I got back from having the CT scan, my doctor came running in and I figured he was going to tell me I had a concussion of worse. No. . .he said, and I'm quoting him here, “Did you know you have massive amounts of hydrocephalus?” I had to bite my tongue to keep from coming back with a smart-mouthed answer, but I simply asked him “did you find anything besides that?”

See what I mean when I titled this “Not my favorite Friday night?”

Until next time. . .

Walter