Cripes that’s horrible.
Were you in a car crash?
LOL! No!
I simply climbed on the seat of a ladder-backed chair in my kitchen to get down a roll of aluminum foil from the top shelf of my pantry. As I was getting down, something went wrong and I fell. On the way down I hit the top of my head on the male corner of a cement wall. Then I landed on the lumbar portion of my back onto my tile floor before my head continued its downward descent crashing and actually bounced a few times when the back of the head met the floor. Amazingly, I never lost conciousness.
I knew better than to climb on a chair.
I was over in Papua Indonesia at the time. My maid heard my screaming and when she realized it was my back she pounded on it as if to push the bone back into place.
I immediately called the ex-pat medical team and they were on site within five minutes. Taking me to the hospital went very smoothly. BUT the ex-pat doc didn’t suspect the skull fracture because there was no blood and the conciousness thing and because I passed the neurological response tests. So, we just x-rayed the back which at the time didn’t reveal the fracture. It was felt I got off lucky and that I didn’t need to med-evac out.
Two weeks later when the swelling on the head (goose egg) went down it was obvious I had a problem. We repeated x-rays, in the remote location there were no other tests available, which showed a slight depressed skull fracture now healing and the green stick fracture of the L5 vertebrae, also now healing. The x-rays were eventually emailed to an orthopedic doc in Singapore who also felt that nothing further was to be done.
At present I have about an hour and a half “sit” time and then I have to be horizontal for a while. I can make it through about a trip into one store, then I have to be horizontal. I could get pain meds overseas but here I’m having problems. So, I learning to be patient.