Head wound

Moss: Roy, you've got a head wound there. Head wound!

On Sunday I thought I'd perform some minor apartment maintenance, so I decided to figure out whose stuff everything in the fridge was. Eleanor was sitting on the couch, so I took out each of the unknown items in the fridge and asked her about it. With her help, I managed to pull out 5 or 6 bottles of expired or unwanted food material, and I threw them away. Then I noticed the trash bag was pretty full, so I decided to throw the bag out. But Eleanor beat me to it, and because that made me feel a little useless, I decided to take out the recycling to compensate.

There's a dumpster right beside our building, but there's no specific recycling bin, so I decided to use the Fairfax recycling dump, not 100m away. I threw it all in the bin, but a little piece of paper fell off on the floor, so I bent down to pick it up, and then I stood up. Tried to, anyway - I felt my head blocked by a sharp object, and it bounced me back down hard enough for me to switch to alert mode. Pain swelled up on my head, and my right hand shot up to it to sense it and hold it. My thoughts at that moment were many:

• OUCH!
• What the heck did I bump up against? Oh, a disc-shaped metal piece at the end of the bin's handle bar. Yeah, that seems like it would hurt. It does.
• Bumped my head pretty hard, there's probably blood. I'll figure it out soon.
• Wow yeah, I can feel a little trench in my head. There will most certainly be blood.
• These bins are dangerous, and a lot of people use them. I wonder how often this happens?
• FREAKING tiny piece of paper I wanted to recycle!! Now you get to stay on the ground, and never be recycled!! EVER!!
• My head feels wet. Oh, now my cheek does. Now it's down my chin. Oh yeah, blood. It's already on my t-shirt!?! Drips on my arm, drips on the trash can!
• If I go back to the apartment, I might blood the whole place up. Gotta be careful.
• Need disinfection and a bandage, but do not want a hospital. Hospitals involve too much overhead.
• Not sure who to call now, and my recycling bin is still here. Back to the apartment it is.

So I briskly walked back to the apartment, and I saw Min just coming in to give me my found blender lid. Eleanor was coming out of the apartment too, so we all met at about the same time, and both of them could see that my head was bleeding. I put the recycling bin in the apartment, got my stuff, and then walked to SHS (Student Health Services) with Eleanor.

Once there, we read a sign on the door that said Sunday: Closed, so we called CMU Police. They sent an EMS team to where we were, and they disinfected and bandaged my head, all the while asking me questions about how it happened, where it hurt, and whether I wanted to go to the hospital. I said no to the hospital idea, even though they warned me my head could scar if I didn't get stitches. Since few people look directly at my scalp anyway, I thought it was kind of silly to care about that, and decided to just go back to the apartment and continue with my life.

While walking back, though, I thought that hair might not grow on scarred scalp. I didn't care for the idea of an anomalous scarred bald spot on my head, so I changed my mind and decided to go the hospital. But I was hungry, so I cooked some pasta, put some Three Cheese Prego sauce in it, ate it, and called CMU Police again. They were kind enough to drive me to Shadyside Hospital, where I signed up at the ER, waited for about an hour, got transferred to a little bed+room area with a curtain, waited there for about half an hour, and finally got treated by a doctor, who saw my cut, decided to staple my head, and afterwards left a very pained me holding my head with a sharp stinging sensation on my scalp waiting on the bed for my paperwork, for another half an hour. I finally got out of there, went back to the apartment, and that was it.

As extra tidbits, that day was also Sept 11th, anniversary of the famous and infamous 9/11 incident in NYC. It was also the day of Guatemalan elections, whose presidential part resulted in, according to my Guatemalan facebook circles, sadness and disillusionment. The candidates have been narrowed down to what are called "the two worst", and the best course of action has become choosing the "lesser evil". I predict more disagreement between the preferences for these two candidates, Otto Pérez Molina and Manuel Baldizón, than there was between all the other candidates put together (in my facebook circles), between which a clear, almost unanimous support was shown for Eduardo Suger.

Then last night Sarah came back from her trip to Lancaster, I showed her the colored bridge outside of GHC, she stayed in my room, and this morning I took her to see Heinz Chapel and the Purnell Center for the Arts. We had lunch at Little Asia, and then she left to work her BK shift, 3-10PM. Then I decided to stay home and work on my courses here, since I still don't dare wash my head, and I don't want to show up at the office with a smelly aura. Then I tried to reinstall MySQL server, but it doesn't want to run on my OS X 10.5.8 for some reason. Shame. So I'm trying to see if PostgreSQL works better. I also decided on my project for SPLODD (the sample project to identify geographical places in a text, using an Atlas as the dataset reference. Sounds cool :).

And if someone's curious about the initial quote of this post, it's from The IT Crowd, S01E01.