A Thanksgiving I wish I could remember

What happened?
What did I do?
Where is my gear?
How many hospitals have we been too together? (question to Erin)
Only two you’re getting off easy (my response to Erin)
Did you tell them I am allergic to sulfa drugs
This is the best hospital I’ve been to in Europe.

These are the questions that I kept asking every 90 seconds for the better part of the day this Thanksgiving..
This time a week ago I was driving south from Berlin to a small ski area in Austria; to say I was excited would be a major understatement.
The last thing I remember is getting gas north of Munich around 10 pm Wednesday night.
Thursday night I wake up long enough to wonder where I am, and realize that I am not dead because I can reach over and touch Erin. I smile and fall back into a mix of head injury and sleep.
I wake up Friday morning; notice my neck and abs really hurt; my eyes are slow to open and focus. I look out the window and see a mountain that looks like the mountains around Estes Park. One of my first thoughts is how did I get to Estes?
One of my next thoughts was what the hell happened to me?
Erin explained that I was skiing in a white out and feel about six feet; if it where not for my helmet the spots of blood that the cat scans found in my brain would be much larger. This news does not make me happy, but at this point I am just glad to wake up to my beautiful wife.

I quickly go threw my memory:
Parents names, day I got married, address back home, phone numbers, friends names, peoples faces, email passwords, bank accounts, its all there!!

Friday was spent taking EEG tests, heart tests, ultra sounds, and getting to know my two other roommates that I was sharing a room in the Neurological ward with. They told me their names, but I decided to call the one that had his head bandaged “Rio” and the one that snuck alchool into the room “Zach”. These guys are not nearly as cool as their namesakes, but they would have to do for the week.
I don’t really remember much from Friday, and in retrospect really was not doing to well. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been on Erin.

Saturday I woke up and felt good, not great but good. I was going to be OK. I still had to be in the hospital for 3 more days, but I was going to be OK..

I never claimed to be a smart man (something that has become harder with the loss of brain cells recently), but I have been smart enough to learn from my mistakes. So I decided that I would spend the next few days learning from this mistake. The problem with this objective is that I don’t remember about 48 hours of my life, and that where I had my accident was substantially below my skiing ability. My inability to learn from this mistake was really starting to bother me; after all if I could not learn from it then what was the point of causing this much stress in people?
This need has been with me for the last 5 days; at first I thought life was telling be to back off the adventure sports that I love to do, but then it hit me! Everything that happened this year the marriage, joy, success, pain, shitty times, injuries, the move, and general stress of 2007 happened so that we could slow day and same “Dam we are lucky” lucky to be alive, lucky to be married, lucky to have such great friends, lucky to have great family, lucky to have a job, lucky to have my brain, and lucky to have had so many experiences in life that have left me breathless and feeling very lucky.
So even though I was throwing up, getting cat scans, wondering who I was this past Thanksgiving does not mean that I did not learn to be thankful to call you all friends and to be alive.
In the words of our guide from Machu Picchu “everything is possible, and nothing is sure” so make sure you slow down a bit and realize just how dam lucky we all are this holiday season.

(Thanksgiving dinner?)