Let's Hear it for my Thick Skull!

know I’d suffered injuries and fully expected them to see at least a few telltale marks. I remember all of these incidents well, possibly a side effect of the nature of the injury and the fact that I never lost consciousness; I’ve never been knocked out.

     The first time I’m surprised I remember but I’ve cross-checked it with the adult who raised me and that’s exactly how it happened. I was 2 ½. I saw something on top of a book shelf that I wanted, I think it was a pottery vase. Supervisory attention was turned away from me briefly as there was a bed to be made, but I know I didn’t think about that anyway, I wasn’t trying to get away with anything. I just saw the thing and wanted it and saw a way to climb to it. I remember just doing that, not thinking about it but just doing it, and then the dresser was tipping over and there was no instinct or reflex in my body to help me. It was absolutely terrifying, I heard the adult scream, I hit the floor a second after the back of my head hit the bed frame, the shelves landed against the bed above me, showering me with objects. I remember the adult’s hysteria, the shock of it all, the pain, throwing up.

     The second time was not my fault. I was four years old, attending a daycare of which I retain quite a bit of memory, maybe because I was only there for a short while (I’m told it was a matter of a few weeks while we were moving from one place to another place, as we did not all that rarely). The supervision there wasn’t so good; there was a large house, with a kitchen and a living room we could go to, and a larger back yard full of trees and bushes and some sort of shed affair where we could paint and so on. The adults tended to congregate in the kitchen. I remember one day, a group of other kids and I wanted to paint so we looked and looked for an adult to ask if it was all right but we couldn’t find anyone. The others started painting anyway, so I decided to do so as well but I was bothered by not having permission; we were supposed to ask permission. I kept looking around anxiously for a supervisor. Finally, one of the people supposed to be watching us wandered out to where we were painting, and I endeavored to ask him if what we were doing was all right. The problem was, I was four years old and, although something of a prodigy regarding my mother tongue, really hadn’t mastered the finer points of phrasing. I asked him, gesturing at what we were doing, at the open poster paint jars and rag paper strewn everywhere, all of us daubed with a variety of colors, “Can we paint?” meaning, “Is is OK that we’re painting?” Obviously he looked puzzled and said, “You are painting.” I replied, “Yes, but can we paint?” This went in a few circles until he threw his hands up, yelled, “YOU ARE PAINTING!” and retreated to the house. I concluded that it was all right with him that we were painting and decided to assume this was the same as getting permission to do it.

or paused on my way from point A to point B, but there I was, next to a small stand of some kind of shrubbery and, inexplicably, a marble bathtub. In California in 1973, it really wasn’t unusual for a larger yard to have a bathtub dumped in it, although marble was somewhat exotic. They were handy in summer for keeping the dogs hydrated, or dabbling your feet or children in, you could plant potatoes or set up a fire pit in them, and it was all cheaper than getting it hauled off and dumping was illegal (albeit prevalent). So there I was when the bully came along, probably not targeting me but not one to miss an opportunity. In passing, he planted both hands on my chest and shoved. The backs of my knees connected with the side of the tub and my head with the inside edge of the opposite rim.

     I remember the massive blank shock of the impact – always the same, in concussion – and screaming and screaming, feeling blood running down the back of my neck, an adult holding me by the shoulders yelling, “He says he didn’t do it! Did he push you? He says it wasn’t him!” I remember being in so much pain I couldn't focus on anything, throwing up at the doctor’s office, getting back in the car to go to the emergency room. The x-rays. I remember the old advice about not letting me sleep, and they said they didn’t give pain drugs to children. The adult later asked me what I did or said to provoke the attack and scoffed at the idea that it could be “nothing”, but took good care of me until I was all right.

     When I was 7, I did it to myself again. We were out, my family and another, at a cabin, with the dogs. It was a great time. I can’t say what exactly the adults were doing but it was 1976 and there was a hot tub, there were sunsets and walking paths and denser woods, a fireplace. I spent the days tearing around in the wild like I did given the slightest opportunity, looking for lizards and trying to follow deer and [later getting told off for] having long conversations with the odd semi-feral hunter who lived in a trailer out there, climbing trees, splashing around in creeks. This time I was around the back of the cabin. There were some steps, made, as so much out there was, out of old railroad ties, lined on both sides with a variety of beautiful, jagged rocks the cabin’s owner had found in the surrounding countryside. A metal railing ran along the right side, looking deceptively like playground equipment, and I decided to use it for the common playground maneuver of grabbing it and swinging myself around under it to land standing at the bottom of the stairs. As you’ve obviously guessed, things did not go to plan.

time we made it down the mountain to the hospital. There was discussion, while I lay in a room with the lights off for the photosensitivity, trying not to vomit, about how to close the wound but I lost track of that when a nurse arrived to introduce me to IV’s. Probably just saline, but once she’d got it set up I lay there listlessly, staring in stunned fascination at the line entering my arm. Eventually it was decided to give me a butterfly hitch instead of stitches. I was intrigued by the shaving of the front of my head. As we left the hospital, I remember, a woman stopped us as though she had something important to say and explained to the adult that I would need to be kept indoors for a few weeks because if sunlight hit the wound she assumed was under the bandages, it would scar. We laughed about how stupid all that was on the way to the car. I do have the scar still (hidden by my hair, it's a bit too high for people to call me Harry Potter).

     So we get to the next two concussions. These both took place at the worst school I ever attended. Walking to and from this school I was beaten up regularly, once attacked with staple guns, once rammed so hard with a bike that I had to see a doctor for the bruising. A knife was held to my friend’s throat while I was verbally threatened (he'd catcalled us in the hall, making fun of our red hair, and she had called out, "Shut up!"), a girl wearing inappropriately spiky heels kicked a boy in the abdomen and ruptured his spleen – but to be fair, that jerk has it coming. I was 11.

     The first incident occurred on the playground after school. A friend and I were walking toward the exit gate when someone called my name, and I turned around to be hit with a golf ball thrown with great force. I remember thinking even as the inside of my head exploded in that old familiar way how weirdly perfectly that golf ball fit right into my eye socket; I retained an image of its surface, enormous, pocked, scratched and dirty. I can still see that. I fell, obviously, and screamed and writhed and held my hands to my face, and my angry childrearer was summoned from work.

     As we drove home, not to the hospital, I was set straight on a number of points about the incident. First of all, I was informed, I needed to get my paranoia under control: of course the other girl – one of my most persistent and creative bullies – hadn’t done it on purpose... and anyway, if she had, I needed to stop provoking people by being so weird all the time. Furthermore I was educated at some length about the fact that it could not possibly have been a golf ball because if it was a golf ball, that would mean this had been a very serious and dangerous incident and my life might be in danger. The rest of the ride was kept lively with a discussion about how because of leaving work, we were going to have a lean month. It was acknowledged upon arrival at home that I “might” have a “mild” concussion, and I was sent to lie in my room in the dark, the adult occasionally pounding on the door to yell, “You’re not falling asleep in there, are you?” My eyeball itself, in the outlandishly colored, lumpy socket, was bright red for days. 

     At least the next time, although I wasn’t entirely believed, I wasn’t vilified. For one thing, there was an adult witness. I was just walking along the hall, upstairs, between classes. This school was one of those monstrous old institutions which is basically a block with tiny windows, all in concrete. The random show-off who shoved me meant for me to go down the stairs, nobody was under any illusions about that (I believe he received a two-day suspension). Instead, the back of my skull, with an almighty crack, hit the exact corner where two concrete walls met (this is the part which wasn’t believed; I was told later, by someone who had not been there, that had I struck the wall at the angle I claimed it “would have been really bad” so obviously I was exaggerating “again”). The adult witness led me to the nurse’s office and left me there. 

pain back in, whimpering. She told me to go to class. I told her my head hurt too much. She told me to stop being dramatic, and pulled me abruptly to a sitting position by one arm. I threw up. She rolled her eyes and said fine, I could continue to lie there and if my head still hurt that much in an hour she would call and force the adult to lose more work on my account. She wiped up the vomit and, when I told her a few minutes later in a panic that I was about to throw up again, she stuck a waste basket next to the bed and went back to her magazine in the outer room. I rolled around in agony clutching my head and sobbing for another hour, with her occasionally sticking her head in and asking if I was ready to go back to class. Finally, after I begged her some more, she called – and when I was picked up we went straight to the emergency room. I’m told my pupils were wildly different sizes, I was walking as though drunk, and was white as bone. If memory serves, the nurse was reprimanded.

     That only leaves two more. Neither was as bad as the previous incidents, resulting in only a few days of nausea, dizziness, and vicious, staggering headache. The reaction to the first incident and the way the atmosphere at home had been developing led to me not even mentioning the last one.

     One day when I was around 12 or 13, a not unfamiliar occurrence took place: a bored group of teenage boys on bicycles saw me walking home from school and decided to give chase. This group weren’t actually the kind to just keep on kicking and beating a person, like some at my other schools, but I also didn’t really feel like being spat on while having dirt dumped down my collar and my hair pulled as my books were thrown into the road, or whatever harmless fun they had in mind that day, plus I had been rammed with a bike once and had a somewhat visceral reaction to a herd of them coming my way, so I ran. They were about to catch up with me so I dodged and hurdled a low chain which hung across the entryway to a parking lot to indicate that it was closed. Or at least most of me hurdled it. My left foot didn’t, and I slammed to the ground on my face. The boys didn’t need to do anything to me at all; they just laughed and jeered while I struggled to my feet, knees and palms shredded, pants ruined, both eyes already swelling and blood all over my face from the abrasions on my forehead. They followed me home, mocking me the whole way, dispersing as I approached my front door.