As many of you may know from my continuous whining, three years ago my life changed. First my eye doctor stabbed me in the eye, resulting in corneal surgery that didn't work, and left me with a painful recurrent condition.
Then I fell in a restaurant and suffered a bad concussion. Then, as I recovered from that one, I went to a drugstore (rhymes with Ballgreen's) where a tiny woman was trying to put heavy wheeled suitcase-style coolers on the top shelf by actually climbing the shelves. She couldn't see me, I didn't see her, and a suitcase fell from the sky and landed on my head.
Once you've had a concussion, you'll have others. My gait and balance were badly affected, my speech is funny (long pauses while the mental file cabinet spins, looking for words like "trees" and "submarine"), my memory and concentration are for shit. Here's an example.
I got a call from a lawyer this week. I didn't know him. He had to explain to me that the company that rhymes with Ballgreen's had offered a settlement in our suit.
Suit? Lawsuit? Wha? Yes, we had filed a lawsuit way back when, against Ballgreen's and the restaurant and the eye doctor.
The thing is that I had forgotten about it. Completely forgotten it. Concussionland.
Just as well. Ballgreen's has offered a generous settlement of $6500 for a lifetime of trouble. $6500 for not providing one of their own workers a damn ladder so she could see what she was doing, or yell "Look out!", so I could receive that dreaded second head injury. I've had several since then.
In fact, my ENT, who did sinus surgery on me to try to relieve the awful corruption of taste and smell I've had since the beginning of the year, now thinks it's damage to my first cranial nerve. Infection? A night when I put my head down on my pillow a little too hard and one more neuron gave up? Who knows?
I'm taking the settlement. I don't want to go to trial. We can use the money.
$6500. For my mind. Nice to have a price on it.