Collision at Home: It's Not Easy to be the Villain

By Mink

Ok what is worse? Being sent to the hospital as a result of a collision in a softball game or being the guy that sent someone to the hospital (with a bleeding lung) after a collision?

Many of you certainly will choose the former (for the record I hate it when people use the former/latter crap in their writing...maybe I'm just very slow but those phrases confuse me nearly as much as my enjoyment of madonna's music). Anyway, in the immediate moments following the accident, I decided that assuming the man didn't pass away or enter into a schiavo-like condition, that it was far better to be him (the needy victim) than it was to be me, (the asshole villain).

Here is a brief rundown (no pun intended for you baseball fan nerds like me) of this past sunday's events:

In the first inning of our second game of a double header on sunday, I was on third base trying to score (again no pun intended for you perverts like me) on a groundball hit toward first. To make a long story short, I slid awkwardly into him as the ball arrived and my right knee hit him square in the rib. The force caused him to drop the ball and I was safe! But immediately something didn't look right. I think his rollover and subsquent schoolgirl-like moans interspersed with 20-30 F-bombs were a giveaway.

At this point the game came to a complete halt and his entire team began tending to the wounded soldier. Five or six of them lifted the husky dude off the field and onto a nearby table shoving ice in his face and anywhere else on his body. I love how people with no first aid knowledge (myself included) really believe that some ice will fix everything. I think 90 percent of the people there assumed he would rub his injury with the cold pack until the coolness was unbearable at which point he would get off the ground, spring to his feet as if nothing happened. Well, not on this day.

After watching him continue to groan and clutch his ribs, and then being informed that 911 was on its way, I determined that this situation was potentially ugly. I was only able to make this "potentially ugly" assessment as a result of my extensive experience of being a doctor's son as well as a former First Aid counselor on a west coast teen tour for spoiled Jewish kids from New York. (I know I said I didn't have first aid experience before but I'm not sure that being entrusted with carrying around a bagpack full of bandaids, cough drops, and tampons for a whole summer really counts).

So the game was stopped for about 40 minutes as we waited for the ambulance with everyone tending to the fallen victim. But for me, the real victim here, I could only stand on the side and feel helpless (as well as proud for scoring the run), realizing that I singlehandedly caused the circus. That I may have in fact killed a man. That an entire team wants me to die as well. That it is late in the morning and I am famished. That I am also dehydrated and sunburned. BUT NO ONE CARES, cuz they are too busy worrying about the other guy.

The bottom line is being the victim may suck but being the victimizer is far worse. As it turns out, the catcher only suffered some internal bleeding in his lung (no joke) and was released from the hospital the next day. He probably is getting tons of ice cream and ladies because of it. I, on the other hand, continue to get death threats from his team and my sunburn has begun to peel.