While I served as the Chief of the Armament Maintenance Branch for the Deputy Chief of Staff, Matériel, 19th Support Command at Camp Henry, Korea, I lived in an apartment at the Sue Song Heights housing complex in Taegu. To be more specific, I lived on the fourth floor of the apartment to which I was assigned at that housing complex. If you recall, and if you read it, I previously lamented about the inherent issues involved with living on the fourth floor of that apartment building. Well, I am here to tell you that there is an issue that not even I thought about prior to its occurrence. That’s correct. Do not go out and spend hundreds of dollars on an eye exam or new designer glasses or thousands of dollars on Lasik surgery for your eyes. You probably don’t need it. Unless of course you’re already blind as a bat. What I’m trying to tell you is, wait, what am I trying to tell you? Oh yeah. The issue that I am referring to was so bizarre and so unforeseen that nobody could have predicted it would happen. Certainly not me. But happen, it did. And when it happened, those stairs became an insurmountable obstacle. What’s that you ask? Oh yes. The rest of the story. Do you remember those mountains and ridges that I talked about previously that I hiked religiously in Taegu? As it turns out, there was a cliff in those mountains that many of the hikers used for rappelling. In order to avoid them and the cliff, I took a side trail which was a bit of a detour. I had never been on that trail before and it looked like nobody else had been on it before either. Well, that’s not entirely true. Somebody had to have been on that trail before because there was a trail. Trails generally don’t create themselves. Yeah. I know. Critters can create trails but not big super highway looking trails. This one actually looked like a firebreak or something along those lines. It was just really overgrown with weeds and brush. All the weeds and brush told me that nobody had passed that way in all long damn time. I didn’t really mind being a trailblazer because usually you can see new scenery that way. Unfortunately, that particular trail was so overgrown that I couldn’t really see obstacles until they jumped up and tripped me or almost tripped me. One such obstacle actually jumped right up off of the trail and grabbed a hold of my legs and threw me forcefully to the ground like I was a ragdoll. I’m not lying. That sonofabitch body slammed me. I hit the ground hard. I hit the ground so hard that it caused a tremor that registered magnitude four on the Richter scale. You could literally feel the ground shake. Well, I got up and dusted myself off and tested myself out and seemed no worse for wear. I quickly looked around to make sure nobody had observed me take that huge humiliating stumble. I did not see anybody laughing their ass off and I could not hear anybody rolling in the weeds and cackling and calling me all sorts of childish expletives. As a result, I figured that nobody had witnessed my huge wipeout. Thus, I continued on my way down the hill and toward my house. Two weeks later, notice I said two weeks later, I woke up one morning to get ready for work. Well, that’s as far as I got. I woke up. I couldn’t move. When I say that I couldn’t move, I mean that I could not move anything. I couldn’t move either of my arms or either of my legs. I couldn’t wiggle a finger and I could not wiggle a toe. Nothing below my neck would move. When I told my wife, she thought I was faking. I asked her, “How do you think I can fake this? Go get a pin and jab it into me somewhere and see if I feel it.” When my wife came back with a pin, I asked her to cover my head with a blanket or a shirt so that I couldn’t see. Then, I asked her to stick me with a pin anywhere below my neck. She jabbed me three different times with the pin, but I couldn’t feel it. She had proof. Cuz I started to bleed in those three places. She asked me what we were going to do. I said, “You need to go and get a couple of the neighbors to carry me downstairs.” She said, “I can call an ambulance.” “An ambulance will not come out here because we’re too far away from Camp Walker. You need to just go down and get a couple of neighbors to carry me downstairs. We’re going to have to get us to the hospital.” So, my wife went downstairs and asked a couple of my neighbors if they would carry me downstairs to the front door. When they asked why, she explained to them that I couldn’t move. When my neighbors were carrying me down the stairs, they had to stop at every landing to rest. They were afraid that they might drop me. Shit. They weren’t half as scared as I was. I already couldn’t move. When I got to the hospital, the first thing they did was to take x-rays of my neck and spine, then they immobilized my neck and put me in a wheelchair until the doctor could see me. The x-ray technician came out and popped my x-rays into one of those florescent x-ray viewing panels. While I was sitting there staring at my x-rays, a doctor passed by, noticed the x-rays, and stopped to look at them. After looking them over for a while, he commented, “Damn. That is one seriously screwed up neck. I wonder how in the hell that sonofabitch broke it?” Then, he saw me sitting in the wheelchair. I saw a light bulb of understanding come on over his head. Finally, pointing at the x-rays, Einstein said, “Is that you?” I replied, “What gave me away? Was it the wheelchair? Wait, I know. It was this big ass brace around my neck, right?” “How did you break your neck?” “How in the hell would I know? I didn’t know it was broke until you just told me.” “Well, you must have had some sort of symptoms.” “You are absolutely correct. I woke up this morning and I could not move. Those were my symptoms.” “Nothing before that?” “Can you give me an example of what you mean?” “You mean to tell me that prior to waking up this morning, you never had any symptoms?” “That’s right. I had none. It was like somebody flipped a switch and said, suddenly, “Your battery is dead. You don’t have any power. You didn’t pay your electricity bill.” “That’s really strange.” That doctor wanted me to recall every accident that could have involved possible injury to my neck, but I couldn’t think of any. I told him about the hiking incident two weeks prior to coming in. I also told him about all of the times that I had played football in the Army. While I was at the hospital, the doctor gave me a muscle relaxant which caused everything to loosen up. About two hours later, my stiff neck went away, the electricity came back on in my body, and I chalked everything up to just another stupid exercise in futility.
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