Janet’s Boss’s House

Somewhere in Cleveland, OH

I was in the emergency room of Akron General Hospital, waiting for a doctor after they had just taken X-rays on my chest, back, and both legs. I was part of what the ER staff probably calls “the last call injuries.” Between the hours of midnight and 4 a.m. there isn’t a bar in your city that has more drunks inside it than the ER. When I entered, around 3 a.m., it was like entering Grand Central Station but in a world where every passenger is drunk and doesn’t know what train to board. Actually, it was more like a giant monster had attacked a Jimmy Buffett concert and this was the hospital they rushed all victims to.

A guy across the aisle from was in one of those two-person donkey costumes, but with the second person missing, so the ass-end of the costume was dangling on the floor. The front end of the donkey was standing above a man who was passed out on the floor; this passed-out body must have formally been the ass-end of the costume. From what I could gather, the guy on the floor concussed himself in “a major karaoke mishap.”

The guy in the front-end of the costume explained that he could not see too well so, when they decided to sing karaoke together, the front-end accidentally backed the ass-end off the edge of the stage, causing the rear-end to fall off violently, ripping open the donkey costume and concussing the ass-end.

The worst part of injuring yourself in a donkey costume in August is that you feel the need to explain why you are in a donkey costume. Every time a doctor or nurse entered and asked what the problem was, this guy began with, “Well first let me explain why we are in a donkey costume...”

(They were both SMU grads, by the way.) I once read that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention—America’s foremost scientists in the fields of public health, safety, and pathology—estimate that the consumption of alcohol costs the U.S. economy $225 billion in lost wages due to workers not being able to perform well because of injuries or hangovers. I believe every penny of that is correct based on what I saw inside that ER that night. We are probably losing a couple million dollars in damaged, two-person donkey costumes alone.

Everyone in that emergency room seemed to have a shocking, obvious injury—burns and fractures and wide, bleeding cuts—yet no one could remember how they hurt themselves. There was a constant murmur of phrases like, “We are still trying to piece it together,” or “I’m not sure what happened,” or, my favorite, “Honestly, doc, I think I may have been given a bad beer.”

Nobody blamed their injuries on alcohol. They each went out of their way to blame their injuries on everything but the volume of booze they consumed. One guy said he fell down two flights of stairs because the stairs weren’t built correctly. A woman with alcohol poisoning contended, “I think it was drinking in the hot sun that got me. As a doctor you know this, but the sun is your worst enemy.”

I suppose, to a degree, I was like them. When a doctor finally reached me, he was holding a packet of X-rays and asked, “So what exactly happened?”

“Well, Doc,” I answered, “I guess the easiest way to explain it is: I just really like Huey Lewis and The News.”
 

Huey Lewis and The News have always been one of my favorite bands, but at the time of this story—the late 1990s—they had fallen somewhat from their 1980s-level fame. I was fresh out of college, working as a network engineer in Cleveland, when my buddy Eric, a childhood friend who was now in med school, returned home for the summer. Eric was studying to become a pharmacist, and when he and I were making plans for the weekend, he mentioned a pharmacy convention he knew of that had an open bar and had Huey Lewis and The News booked as the entertainment.

“What?” I gasped. “I love Huey Lewis and The News! We gotta go!”

“I don’t know,” Eric demurred, “it’s not open to the public. It’s invite-only. I can probably get a lanyard for myself, but how would we get you in?”

“The convention is run out of a hotel, right?” I suggested. “We’ll go to happy hour there—everyone will be wearing the lanyards—and we will find some old guy that doesn’t want to attend the concert. Old guys don’t stay up for concerts. I’ll ask to borrow his lanyard and attend as him!”

We went to happy hour and got unexpectedly drunk. “Unexpectedly drunk” is a common phrase among my friends. We talk about drinking the way a sailor talks about weather, like it’s out of our hands:

“I had no intention of staying out late,” I will explain to my wife, “but the bar was selling Manhattans for only $4. They might as well have kidnapped me!” Eric and I got drunk at the hotel happy hour, and, better yet, got hold of a lanyard. The plan was working! We met Bob Doppell, an old guy out of New Jersey who was attending the conference, and who let me borrow his credentials. I went to the Huey Lewis and The News show as:

BOB DOPPELL Vice President of Operations   BOLD MEDICAL SOLUTIONS Morristown, New Jersey

 

We went to the show and it was open bar and it was great. We spent a lot of time near the bar and I was pretty good about introducing myself as “Bob,” remembering my fake credentials. However, each person I met was curious about the strategy behind “Bold Medical Solutions.”

“What makes it so bold?” they would ask, and I probably should have avoided the question, but I thought to myself:

“God dammit, I’m Bob Doppell. I’m the Vice President of this company! I probably built it by hand and Bob Doppell didn’t get where he was by evading questions at an open bar, so I’m gonna do what Bob Doppell would do and answer this question and hit it out of the park!”

Which led to me answering such questions with, “Well, for example, we’re the first company to ask, maybe cancer isn’t the problem? Maybe human beings are the problem?”

Eric gave me a look as if to say, “You’re really going to go with that?” I kind of shrugged at him, indicating that I couldn’t think of anything better. But then the person I was talking to would chew on my response for a moment and come back with, “That’s really interesting; that’s really different.”

And that’s when I realized: these assholes were more drunk than us!

From that point forward I stopped even thinking about my responses. I had a different, ludicrous answer for each person I talked to. I told one guy I was trying to cure hangovers in mice. I told another drunk salesman that I was the person who had come up with the term “Broken Branch Syndrome.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“You know that feeling you get, when you are about to fall asleep and then suddenly your body jolts up because you feel like you are falling out of a tree? Yep, I named that.”

(I later looked it up and there is a real name for that sensation—a hypnagogic jerk—and, though I realize that in my guise as Bob Doppell, I was a fake medical expert, I nonetheless consider “broken branch syndrome” a significant improvement on the existing nomenclature and worthy of publication in whatever sleep journal does the most cursory credential checks.)

We kept drinking and Huey Lewis and The News kept playing and it was a great time. As the show wound down, I saw Eric talking to some of the other convention-goers and nodding his head. He returned to me with a woman, Janet, who invited us to an after-party.

As Janet began explaining how to get to the house, I stopped her with, “I think we will be fine with just the address thank you,” which was a bold interruption given that according to my cover story I lived in New Jersey and we were currently in Cleveland.

Thing is: I’ve always hated listening to driving directions.

To me, finding a destination is like listening to a song; you need to be quiet and let the beat guide you. Directions are a distraction; you become so busy reciting and re-verifying your memories of the directions—“Did they say ‘right’ here?”; “Was it the first light or the second?”—that you miss the song. It becomes an obsession. I like to be laid back and let the road—the music— lead me.

I got lost a lot. This time, we were missing, driving around aimless, for almost ninety minutes; an achievement when you consider the house was only ten minutes away from the venue. Nevertheless, we reached what we thought was the after hours party, but it was so quiet that we were worried that either we had the wrong house or the right house and everyone had left .

The house seemed asleep; in fact, the entire neighborhood seemed to be resting. It was in a peaceful, beautiful section of Cleveland; hilly with old houses and the river off in the distance. We were wondering if we should leave when a couple came out onto the porch to smoke, spotted us and asked, “Who’s there?” I yelled back “It’s Eric and Bob!” They laughed about how long it took us to get there and invited us up.

It was a huge Victorian house and we met people on the first floor, in a large, open living room. Eric knew some of them and they were most assuredly not like the drunks at the convention; this seemed to be the “A” team. They clearly understood the science behind pharmacy and didn’t seem to be as obnoxiously drunk as the previous crowd, so probably wouldn’t accept my claims about innovating in the field of cancer unchallenged. I started to think, “I might be out of my league here,” and resolved to avoid talking about work.

I walked into a separate, empty room, and that’s when I noticed the view: a huge, curved bay window, with the Cleveland skyline, alight above a gleaming river.

“It’s beautiful,” I said to myself.

A thought occurred to me. I raised my voice and asked, loudly, “WHO WANTS TO GO UP TO THE ROOF?” I ran back to the living room where the other guests were, my arms bouncing wildly, letting them know I was about to propose the best plan:

“Who wants to go up to the roof?” I demanded, again.

“Uhh, I don’t think it’s that kind of roof, Bob,” someone replied.

“Yeah, um, technically this is our boss’s house, Bob,” Janet interjected, concerned, “and he’s not here and...I just don’t think we should do anything stupid.”

“Well you know what,” I countered, “when I said I was gonna start my own company a lot of people told me that was a stupid idea.”

Eric was gesturing “NO,” at me by slowly but emphatically shaking his head back and forth. Everyone else was staring at me blankly.

“Sometimes in life—just like pharmacy—a lot of stupid ideas become smart,” I intoned solemnly, before yelling: “Now, who’s with me? Let’s find that roof!”

I led a charge up the stairs, expecting the entire party to follow but I only heard the next song come on the radio: Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend.”

I charged straight to the top, the third floor. As there was no obvious attic or drop-down ladder to reach the roof, I opened a window and put my torso out to get a sense for how hazardous the climb would be. The roof had a dizzyingly steep angle with slick tiles; it would be like walking down a greased playground slide. “Damnit,” I thought, “I can’t lead these drunks onto this roof; they’ll probably kill themselves!”

I quickly returned to the stairs and descended to the second floor. When we arrived, I had noticed there was a portico between the first and second floor and realized I could probably get on it from one of the second story windows. I opened one of them and, sure enough, it was just a few feet down to the portico. I easily descended to it; it was as flat as a pier and perfect for viewing the skyline. I started thinking about how wrong that guy who said “It’s not that kind of roof,” was gonna be when he got up here and saw this perfect platform.

I began to explore the portico more fully, trying to discover the best vistas of the skyline; the ones with the fewest trees blocking one’s sight, and as I was doing so, I started to think about how we would fit everyone up here. You can’t invite fifteen people to a roof, then look like a moron with no plan when they arrive.

Eric told me later that by this point, everyone inside had moved to the large bay window, the one I had been gesturing to earlier, and they were reassuring each other that there is no way “Bob” could actually get onto the roof; that he would be fine. Janet turned to Eric and asked, “You don’t think he’s going to do something stupid do you? Like is he going to fall and accidentally kill himself?”

“Listen,” Eric reassured her, “Bob drinks a lot, yes, but he’s got the Golden Touch. In life and in business.”

And with that, the assembled party guests saw me free-fall into the concrete. Gathered around this giant bay window, they watched my body pencil-dive straight into the concrete walkway, like a vacationer jumping into a lake.

To an outsider, it probably looked as if I was trying to kill myself but wasn’t a good enough athlete to flip my body around to land head first.

Days later I asked Eric what it was like in that room when they saw me hit the ground.

“It was the most disgusting sound I’ve ever heard,” he said.

“Oh, wow, you actually heard my bones break?” I asked, amazed.

“No,” Eric answered, “it was the sound of ten people thinking they saw a man die. Gasping, screaming. Janet yelled that her boss was going to fire her! It was like being in a box of fear.”

Still screaming, the guests rushed out of the house, and ran down the stairs to the footpath where I had landed. I was moving a bit and grimacing in a kind of muffled pain, so they could see that I was not dead. Not yet at least.

I had walked straight off the roof, not paying attention to my precise position in three-dimensional space. That is to say, I did not slip; I did not lose my balance; I walked straight into the night sky, thinking I had a solid step of roof under me. I don’t know if you’ve ever done this in your house but it was a bit like when you are descending the stairs and you think you are at the last step, and you put your foot down—expecting it to land firmly on the floor—but there’s nothing but air? You missed a step. It was like that, except I was not one, six inch step above the floor; I was two stories above.

Another way of looking at falling off a roof is: you have exited a house at the speed raptors fly at. Which is to say: it’s discombobulating. It takes several seconds to piece together what happened. One moment—often, the last instant you remember—you are strolling upon a perfectly nice roof; the next you are rolling on the ground, in pain, with strangers above you screaming and wailing. What’s more, the people crowded above me, as I twisted in pain, could not have appeared any stranger: each of them looked unfamiliar and, more confusingly to me (in that, bewildering instant), everyone was calling me Bob.

“Bob? Bob? Are you OK?” asked one.

“Bob? Do you know where you are, Bob?” pleaded another.

I was so flustered by the fall that for a brief moment I forgot I was “Bob Doppell.” For a second I was just Sean Flannery, about to die on a sidewalk. But their questions eventually placed me back at the party and I remembered: these people don’t know me as Sean. They think I’m Bob Doppell, successful healthcare executive. And that caused a deep dread within me, because I was certain I would die from my injuries within the next few minutes, and, when that happened, these morons would call Bob Doppell’s wife.

They will call his wife and, for two days, until the real Bob Doppell flies back home to New Jersey, she will believe her husband of thirty years is dead. Moreover, she will think he died like a jackass:
 

[*RING RING*]

“Hello?”

“Hello. Is the wife of Bob Doppell?”

“Yes...is everything alright?”

“I’m afraid I have some bad news ma’am...Bob is dead.”

“Oh my God! What was it? A heart attack? Stroke?”

“No ma’am, he walked off a building after drinking about 82 beers.”

I decided my last act on Earth cannot be to sow this confusion. I sat up as best I could, raised my finger to indicate I was about to impart important, final words, and I commanded:

“I don’t care what happens next: no one talks to my wife about this!”

“What?” came a concerned and puzzled voice. “What do you mean, Bob?”

“Do not,” I intoned, “under any circumstances...call my wife!”

I relaxed back onto the ground, exhaled deeply— as if I had completed a great and significant task—then closed my eyes, I suppose, to die.

“Bob?”

“Bob?”

“Bob? Are you OK? Can you hear us?”

At this point I realized I was not drifting off to a better place or getting loopy. I was just laying on concrete with a pretty consistent pain. I began to think that perhaps I was not dying.

“Should we call an ambulance?” someone wondered.

“Should we notify someone at the convention?” asked another.

I reopened my eyes, now fairly confident I was not about to expire. I stared up into the sky, to the anxious faces circled above me and confessed,

“Guys, I gotta level with you: I don’t really know that much about healthcare.”

Eric stopped me from unburdening myself further, interrupting me with, “OK, I think we should get Bob to the hospital!”

Someone whispered to Eric, “I think he has a concussion.” The circle of faces all nodded in agreement: the Vice President of Bold Medical Solutions was on the ground, claiming he knows nothing about healthcare, and rambling orders about not contacting his wife. Clearly this man was not himself.

“Let’s get you checked out, Bob,” Eric suggested, and told everyone to go inside.

“Bob’s gonna be OK,” he assured everyone, “I’ll take him to the hospital.”

“Are you sure?” someone asked.

“Yeah, no problem. I’ve got him. Go enjoy the rest of the party.”

It’s clear to me now that Eric wanted to get us away from these people before they figured out that I was not Bob Doppell; that I was, instead, some drunk who snuck into a free concert, fooled his peers with elaborate, cocksure lies, and then walked off a building. If they discovered all that about me, then they would also discover the truth that worried Eric even more: that Eric hangs out with idiots.

“Yep, we are good everyone,” I told the crowd and they began to withdraw, signaling they were ready to return to the party. Then I shook my car keys to show that we were leaving soon, and motioned for Eric to walk with me to the car.

“Bob!” someone objected. “You can’t drive!”

“Oh, I’m fine. Don’t worry about me,” I answered.

“Bob!” came the reply. “You. Fell. Off. A. Roof!”

Another effect of falling off a roof is that you cannot win any arguments for the next few hours. In fact, people won’t even listen to your ideas for at least a few days. Each time I proposed a different plan, a whole crowd of people would dismiss me, out of hand, with: “You Just Fell Off A Roof!”

“Really everyone,” I told them, “I appreciate the concern, but I feel fine.”

This time they all chanted, back at me, in unison: “YOU FELL OFF A ROOF, BOB!” It’s the closest I’ll come to interacting with a Greek chorus in real life.

“Don’t worry; I’m driving him home,” Eric assured them, and pushed me into the passenger’s seat. “Bob’s not driving!” he insisted. Back then—when I was drinking harder—most nights ended with me being thrown into a car the same way Reagan was pushed into a limo after he was shot: a collection of men cramming me into a vehicle for my own protection.

At the time, I drove a 1987 Chevy Cavalier with over 200,000 miles on it that had “GO TRIBE!” daubed on both sides, with a huge image of “Chief Wahoo” on the front hood; all spray-painted by hand, by me. It also had zero hubcaps and the passenger-side door did not work, so Eric had to stuff me into the passenger seat from the driver’s side, which caused the entire car to shake as I tried to maneuver around the gear stick,

“Wait? You drive a stick shift?” Eric asked after seeing me get stuck.

“Yeah,” I replied, “and we are parked on a hill. Want me to at least get us out of this parking spot?”

“No. I got it,” Eric said.

He started the car. The party-goers were still outside watching us, and got to hear the most annoying, ear-stabbing noise as Eric struggled to get the shifter into reverse. Eventually—after several seconds of it sounding like he was killing alley cats inside the vehicle—Eric got the car into reverse. With the car now humming quietly, Eric looked up and informed the assembled party guests: “Good to go!”

He hit the gas. We screamed backwards at full speed—like we were shot from one of those catapults the Navy uses to launch jets on aircraft carriers—and smashed into the car behind us. The guests began forming a semicircle, moving closer, concerned. I remember thinking that the nicely-dressed group gathered together on that wide, green lawn sort of looked like they were attending a polo game.

“Is everything OK?” someone asked.

“Yeah, they gave us a stick shift!” I answered back with a “can-you-believe-this-mix-up” shrug. I was still pretending like I was from New Jersey and, I suppose, driving a ten-year-old rental car with no functional doors. Eric was furiously attempting to get the car in first gear so we could leave.

“Got it!” he yelled as the stick moved into first.

“Don’t do anything we wouldn’t do!” I joked back at the polo attendees and Eric peeled out like we are cops leaving to save the mayor. He clipped the car ahead of us with my side mirror, but we were not slowing down for anything.

This is what we used to call “an embassy evacuation”; when we needed to leave a party hastily—at all costs—with every person in our group. An embassy evacuation was ordered after one of us did something — ruined a carpet or an appliance or a marriage—at a party and it was obvious that, once word of this update traveled, we would never be allowed back.

Eric accelerated over the hill; one could hear a knocking noise as we disappeared, which was my side mirror scraping against the door as it dangled from the window. That is the last anyone at that party ever saw or heard from us.
 

There is a sort of freedom after a successful embassy evacuation, when you know you are never going to need to deal with those people again in your life. Usually, when something goes wrong at a party, you fret about the fallout: to whom do you need to apologize? Can we replace that vase? Do I still have a job? But, after an embassy evacuation, none of those things matter; that might as well have happened on Mars. You feel nothing but the joy of a clean escape.

Of course, in this case, there was some residual guilt that I might have irrevocably altered the professional reputation of Bob Doppell. That people in the pharmaceutical industry may have gossiped:

“Have you ever heard of this Bob Doppell, guy? He’s supposed to be a legend: supposedly he’s been in the industry thirty years, but he looks as young as you and can out-drink people half his age.”

“Oh, I have not only heard of Bob Doppell, I’ve met him. I was in Cleveland for a convention. He had about 130 beers—easy—walked off a three story building, then told us not to tell his wife about it. Then, and this is the kicker: he and his buddy got into what was a clearly stolen car and drove off .”

We were now close to Eric’s apartment. He turned to ask if I was sure I was OK.

“Yeah,” I answered.

In reality I had broken my back in three places and shattered my heel.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong,” I continued, “I’m not at my best right now and there’s a general soreness but, overall, yeah, I think I handled that landing pretty well.”

“Really?” Eric countered. “It looked pretty bad to me. I thought you were dead”.

“I know, I know. Me too; me too,” I conceded. “Wanna know what’s even crazier? As I was falling—time kind of slowed down, y’know?—and I was calm about dying because, in my head, I was hearing ‘The Power of Love’!”

We both started laughing. And the laugh grew. Eric was laughing so loudly and violently—slapping his thigh and bending over—that he lost control of the car, causing it to jump over the curb and hit a tree. The car stopped instantaneously. Luckily (well, I don’t know if that’s quite the right word), Eric managed to puncture all four tires when vaulting the curb so we hit the tree slowly, what with the car no longer having functional wheels below it.

“Ugggh,” I exhaled.

“Sorry dude,” Eric apologized, before asking, “what do you want to do?”

“Eric, in the last four minutes I have walked off a roof and been in a car accident with a tree.”

“So…,” he pressed, “...what are you saying?”

“I think you should decide what we do next.”

“Taco Bell?”

“Perfect,” I answered.

We left the car exactly where it had stopped, against a tree on the lawn of a public library. Eric helped me walk to Taco Bell. By this point—and I’m not sure if it was because the adrenaline from when I walked off the roof was leaving me or if I had aggravated my injuries in the car accident three minutes after that, but—I was really struggling to walk.

We reached Taco Bell and they refused to serve us because we were not in a vehicle. Only the drive-through window was open and they insisted we could not walk through the drive-through lane, which I found ridiculous:

“You need to be in a car, sirs,” they insisted.

“What?” I blurted. “We are the only customers in this line that are not actively drinking and driving!”

“Sirs, that’s the rule, for safety.”

“OK,”, Eric responded—he was an undergrad English major—“if we are doing plural formality, can we agree on ‘gentlemen’ instead of ‘sirs’?”

“Yeah,” I added, “we’re not your commanding officers, we just want a burrito.”

“I’m sorry sirs...I mean gentlemen,” they relented, “I can’t serve you if you’re not in a car.”

Luckily the car behind us in line heard the problem and invited us to order from their back seat. I will say this for Cleveland: it has its share of problems, but the drunks there look out for each other.

We ate our food, walked a block back to Eric’s apartment and I went to sleep on the couch, but not before yelling, “Wake me up early so we can pick up my car before that library opens!”

I slept for about an hour before being awoken by a throbbing pain in my back. I initially assumed it was because I had slept in an odd position, so I straightened out, lay motionless on my back and expected to drift back off; but the pain only got worse. After about a half hour or so, I started to suspect that something was wrong with my body. That, maybe, walking off a building might have negatively affected me.

I woke Eric, told him I thought I needed to go to the hospital and that we should call my folks (even if it meant waking them up) and ask for a ride. Enter, my parents.

My mom and dad have been awakened by early morning phone calls several times—they have six kids— and it’s never a positive call. It was usually one of us breaking an arm or leg or getting arrested; and every time my parents arrived they had two distinct roles: my mom would worry if everyone was OK, safe and accounted for; and my dad would just wonder if we did anything he could be sued for.

My dad raised six kids and, as far as he is concerned, this had merely created six different opportunities for him to “lose the house” in a lawsuit. That is how my dad ends every conversation or argument: that a stranger is going to take away his house in court. He might have originally been asked if the car needs gas or how The Electoral College works, but regardless of the initial topic, his reasoning will eventually reach a place where one of his kids will make a mistake serious enough for him to lose his house.

Better yet, these mistakes are usually innocent: a simple matter of failing to shovel snow off the sidewalk or leaving a bike in someone’s driveway; my dad believes somehow these can lead to someone seizing your property in retribution. According to my dad, that’s how the American legal system works: one of your kids makes a trifling error, a stranger sues you over it, and that stranger is given your house. Same business day; no questions asked.

My folks drove me to the hospital. It was a forty-minute drive and they both talked for exactly forty minutes: my mom asking, over and over again if I was sure I was OK and my dad thinking aloud about all the people who could potentially sue him for leaving a car on the yard of a library.

My dad dropped me and my mom off at the ER so he could get back to the other kids. Before leaving he told me, “Sean, the next time you walk off a roof: don’t move, because if you stay there, you can sue the homeowner.”

Which I love because it is the oddest, most-paranoid way to give someone medical advice that is actually, in a round-about-way, correct.
 

The doctor had the results of the X-rays: my back was broken in three places and my left heel was more or less shattered. The breaks in my back were what’s known as “compression fractures”: the three lowest vertebrae were squeezed into a smaller area from the force of the fall. Essentially, I walked off the roof and was drunk enough to not realize I was falling so I kept walking in the air, not bending or adjusting for impact in any way. It was as if the house threw an anchor off its own roof and it landed dead on the concrete.

The doctor was mystified to the point of wondering if he had been given the wrong X-rays.

“I have never seen a compression fracture in this many vertebrae from a fall in anyone under the age of seventy,” he said, adding, “I think we have the wrong X-rays. Because, for these to be correct, it would mean you made no effort to adjust. What. So. Ever.”

“Does that sound like how you landed?” my mom asked, hoping to clarify if we indeed had the right scans.

“My landing,” I answered to my mom and the doctor, “was not”—here I paused the find just the right word—“‘skillful,’ so, yeah, I think we are probably looking at the right evidence.”

The doctor was so disquieted by this that he brought in another surgeon and, after some kibitzing, that second surgeon abruptly left and reentered with a small group of residents.

The new doctor began explaining the uniqueness of my injury:

“Compression fractures from falls are very rare in young people because their reactions are usually good enough to better brace for impact, but this young man… He has several; caused by walking off a roof. We gather that he did not realize he was falling and he continued his walking motion in the air. He basically walked his way into the ground at falling speed.”

“Like Daffy Duck?” one of his residents asked.

“Yes,” replied the surgeon, “like Daffy Duck. Exactly.”

“That said”, the doctor continued, “walking off that way, ‘Daffy Duck’-style as we are saying; being drunk—I’m assuming you were drunk Mr. Flannery?— probably saved your life.”

“What?” I asked.

“The human body accelerates fast enough that a fall like yours, over ten feet?” he explained, “that’s 1,500 to 2,000 some odd pounds of force on impact! Which is why, every fall above ten feet is lethal if you hit your head on impact. It’s too much force for your skull and brain to absorb. But, by being drunk and landing like you did, you protected your head.”

Another doctor, fearing I didn’t ‘get’ the point, added, “Quite! If you realized you were falling, you would have bent your knees, which may have changed your center of gravity and that might have caused you to land differently, potentially hitting your head on the concrete. That would have been assuredly lethal.”

“So”, I asked, just to confirm I was understanding correctly, “being drunk saved my life?”

“In a way, yes,” came the reply.

“But, doctor” a nurse interjected, “isn’t it possible that a sober person may not have been on the roof?”