L
ittle good comes from a head injury, but it does cut down the wait when you show up unannounced at the emergency room. The mention of the words “Horse, thrown, head” pushes you up to the front of the line, ahead of everyone apart from babies that have stopped breathing, epileptics, people with heart failure or severed limbs, and funnel web spider bite victims. My mother arrives and we sit down on three scratched green plastic chairs at the back of the room. Almost instantly, my name is called. I am not fearful. In my mind, I am here to check my brain is not bleeding. A hemorrhaging brain sounds serious. And painful. Frankly I have no clue why I’m here. I feel perfectly normal. Even scarier, I look perfectly normal. I have no problem with speech or movement. And I certainly don’t look as though I have anything even remotely wrong with my brain. Apart from my left eye which struggles to keep pace with my right eye. I am led to a small office and seen by a tall man in beige trousers wearing a light brown jumper with patches on the elbow who tells me he is a neurologist. He is condescending before even opening his mouth. He asks what happened. I tell him. He doesn’t examine my head. He only asks, “Were you wearing a helmet?” “No.” “Why not?” “There wasn’t one.” “Well that is very, very silly. You could have been killed, do you realize that?” “No.” I kind of wish I had been, although I don’t tell him this, for fear of spending the next fortnight strapped to a bed in a psych ward. “The first thing we need to do is get you a head scan. We’ll send you off to Imaging and then you’ll come back here. Go back to the waiting room and I’ll call you in when I have the slides.”
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