Saturday, January 29, 2005

Too much excitement

Well, we had some really good news yesterday. Ethan finally got hired on as a permanent employee at Harborview. Guess that leap of faith leaving a job of 10 years really did pay off. His interview was supposed to be at 130pm, and he would find out if he got the job next week, but they ended up doing his interview at 1030am, and told him he had the job at 1pm. He was so excited! Good news for us.

A little bad news last night, though. Ethan stayed to work some overtime with the mechanical engineering crew, moving out some old generators and heavy equipment--manual labor stuff, mostly. He has been doing this the past few Fridays. Makes him look like a good team player, gets a few extra bucks--all around a good thing.
But this weekend, they were moving these generators, and they were in an area with a lot of stuff around, and somehow someone knocked over a huge gate (about 100 pounds), and they knocked onto Ethan, who was leaning over a generator figuring out how they should secure it or something like that. He ended up with this 100 pound weight hitting him in the back of the head, slamming his forehead down onto the generator. It knocked him out and had him stuck with his head trapped there for a second, before a burst of adrenaline and the return of consciousness made him throw the gate off of him. Not good. He came home at around 730pm, and I hadn't been expecting him until around midnight, if not later. I was happy to see him, since we could watch the Sonics game together, and then he turned around and I saw his head. !!!!! He has a huge egg-size and shape lump in the middle of his forehead, just off to the right side and just above the top of his nose. It was bleeding a little bit, and oozing some clear fluid. He had put some neosporin on it, but it looked horrible. I am sure he has a concussion, and he had pretty blurry vision in his right eye, which has resolved today. THere is a smaller lump on the back of his head where the gate actually hit him. He looks like he got into a fight with a baseball bat.
I am slightly freaked out. He could have been killed! He may or may not have a skull fracture, but since you can't really do anything about that, we are just keeping an eye on things and icing his head to decrease the swelling.

The moral of this story is, no overtime with heavy objects!!!

4 comments:

Davinie Fiero said...

If he got hurt on the job it would be covered by workman's comp. Why didn't he go to the ER? I know you are a nurse, but you can't see inside his head, and really should have hustled him down to get some medical treatment. He could have internal bleeding!
I hope everything is okay, and that he isn't more devastated over missing a ball game than he is over having a big goose on his forehead.

alyca said...

He didn't go to the ER because it was slammed and he didn't want to wait forever there, and he didn't know that as an employee, he is given tons of priority and quickly shuttled into triage where they would examine him. Trust me, he has had an earful from his entire complement of friends as well as from me about not getting this checked out. I got to practice my neuro checks on him, and he is okay, but is filling out an incident report first thing Monday.

Sabrina said...

OH MY GOSH!! Well, I'm glad he is OK, but he should definately take a break for a couple of days to get that all healed... having your head partially crushed earns you a few days off in my book.
CONGRATULATIONS

Sabrina said...

ON THE JOB, THAT IS