Josh, Basketball, and a Wall

Warning:  The pictures ahead show pictures of an actual injury (I have, however, linked the most graphic), so if you are at all squeamish, I would skip this post :)

Thanks! :)

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February 11, 2011

I was spending a nice, relaxing, Friday at home and I got a phone call from Josh’s phone.  When I answered, I heard, “Maegan, this is John Alan.  Are you busy?”  John Alan is a good friend of my brother, but for him to be calling on my brother’s phone made me a little nervous.  Turns out my intuition was right because when I told him I wasn’t, he said “Can you come to the rec?  Josh is hurt.  He busted his head open and possibly broke his nose”  I told him I’d be right there, hung up the phone, threw on workout pants and a sweatshirt over my PJ’s, grabbed a towel, a water bottle, and literally ran out the door.

As soon as I got in the car, I spent the 5 minutes it takes to get the rec to call my mom, and told her what all was going on.  She told me to make sure he didn’t go to the health center, but instead, we might have to bring him home.  Let me preface this by saying, Josh has busted both eyes open previously playing basketball, and he had plastic surgeons stitch them up since they were on his face.  Mom was afraid that if he was taken to the health center, they would roughly stitch him up and it would scar terribly.

Anyway, I got there and this is what I saw (click on the link if you want to see the injury…it is pretty graphic though so just a warning) Apparently Josh tried to knock a ball back into play and he ran right into a wall…poor thing.  After I did some initial inspection (which by the way was rough…he had on a white shirt and gray shorts that were now red.  He looked like he had just been in a knife fight!), Josh hopped in the car with me, and John Alan (poor guy) attempted to drive Josh’s gigantic truck back. 

We had been talking with mom the entire time and she was trying to figure out if I needed to drive him home to his plastic surgeon or if we just needed to stay there and find a plastic surgeon in Tuscaloosa.

Besides being in pain and of course bleeding like crazy, Josh was in pretty good spirits.  Of course, we were worried about a concussion so I had John Alan stay there with him while I ran to get him something to eat (he hadn’t eaten all day), and some stuff to bandage him up.  If you were too squeamish to check out the picture above, here’s one that’s a little more tame:

Josh all bandaged up

My parents ultimately decided that we should just stay in Tuscaloosa and they would come down and take him to the doctor.  No one seemed worry about the urgency of situation, but me, so despite everyone’s advice, I sat over at Josh’s and kept watch just to make sure he didn’t go to sleep on me.

When my parents arrived, we went over to the local hospital ER, and after the obligatory 2 hour wait (my mom demanded a plastic surgeon come in so they had to wait on him too), Josh finally got to go back.  They ran lots of tests to make sure he didn’t have a concussion or any brain trauma, popped his nose back into place, got him all stitched up and he was ready to go.

   

So the next morning, we were anxious to survey the damage.  Although much better than we expected, he still resembled his favorite fictional character…

You can see why we called him “Rocky” all weekend ;)

He got to take his bandages off, so we got a chance to look at the doctor’s handiwork.

It looked MUCH better than the previous day!

Over the next couple of weeks, he healed quite nicely.  I got to get up every morning to doctor and bandage his eye before he went to class.

2/13 -  2 days later, looking a little better, but still swollen.  Without the swelling, it was hard to tell anything was wrong with him with the flesh colored band-aid!

2/15 – A couple days later, the swelling had almost gone down!

2/17 – Going to get stitches out!

2/17 – Bye stitches!

2/17 – Post stitches  Looks amazing compared to what it looked like previously!

2/24 – 7 days after stitches came out.  Scabs are all gone and it is barely noticeable!  :)  We had to go back to the doctor to make sure it was healing well, since he had some bleeding on the far left (the largest part of the wound), but the doctor said it was fine and to just keep sunscreen on it and he didn’t have to come back!

Whew!  Hopefully that is the only injury I have to deal with as “second mama”.  He stressed me out!

Word of advice:  watch out of walls when playing basketball :)