A few summers ago, the whole family was camping/cabining in Prince Edward Island. I was swimming in the campground pool with my sister and her boyfriend one extremely hot afternoon. It actually wasn’t all that refreshing because the owners of the campground kept the pool at 30 degrees Celsius. It was a lot like swimming in a pool of still-hot-from-the-body urine. Anyway, my sister and her man went back to the cabin for supper, and I was fixing to do the same. I finished up pretending to be Aquaman and grabbed hold of the pool ladder in the deep end. I tried to prove how strong I was by launching myself out of the water and onto the rungs of the ladder. When I hauled myself out of the pool, I actually hauled myself right out of my own swimming trunks. My bare ass and I went up the ladder, my shorts stayed put.
Instantly, my hands let go of the ladder and went to my shorts, which were around my ankles. Now I was half bent over, which probably made things a thousand times worse for the people in the pool behind me. I teetered on the ladder for a fraction of a second, bare-assed to all of the other swimmers. Then I made a quick decision to sacrifice myself. I just let gravity claim me. I scraped and ground my shin along the steps of the ladder as my large half-naked body fell back into the pool with an incredible splash.
I was underwater; I tried to stay under there for as long as I could. I knew that everyone above water was laughing at me, and I just couldn’t be up there for that. I’d drown if I had to. I moved along the bottom of the pool, underneath the other swimmers, all the way to the shallow end. As I crawled out of the little kid area of the pool, with my pride wounded, my shin numb, swollen, and oozing blood, I could hear the other swimmers snickering. I walked out of there, head low, and vowed never to be so careless around a pool again.
Okay, now you’re up to speed. The point was that I developed a phobia about exiting pools too quickly and pantsing myself in front of others. Now, we’re jumping ahead in time to this past weekend.
I had been swimming in our backyard pool with my girlfriend and our daughter. My girlfriend’s best friend dropped by with her little girl, and my daughter wanted to get out of the pool to play with her. My girlfriend got out of the pool as well, so I just sloshed around on my own for a while, pretending to be a crocodile. Eventually, I decided to get out and started to climb the ladder. Sounding familiar? This time, though, I exited slowly. NO WAY was I exposing my ass again! No, Sir! We were doing this nice and slow.
I got to the top of the ladder and turned around to start my way down. What I didn’t realize was that because I was going about all of this so slowly and cautiously, the water that was dripping off of my trunks and I was pooling on the top steps. The ladder is only about 5 feet high, but I was standing at the very top. When my feet slipped, I was about 10 feet from the ground.
I fell from the sky like I had been thrown from the heavens. On my way down to the earth, I thought, “Your poor ribs, you’re totally going to break most of them.” When I collided with the ground, my body behaved the same way a ball of play-dough would behave if you dropped it off the Empire State Building. Nothing in me splintered or cracked, but I’m pretty sure the tip of my nose poked my own asshole at one point. The medical term for what I did to myself is probably something like, “Internal Trauma due to blunt force”, but I know what’s up. I don’t need a doctor to tell me that I smooshed myself.
At first I was surprised by how little it hurt, so I jumped to my feet, hoping nobody saw me fall. They hadn’t! Sweet! Then I realized that my left leg, arm, shoulder, and lung weren’t working properly. My limbs were numb, I could barely breathe, and I had a pounding headache from where the back of my head had snapped against the ground. It’s funny, when I was a kid I would have walked around, shaking the parts of me that hurt, maybe crying or saying, “Ow, Ow, Ow”, but definitely making an effort to “walk it off”. Now though, my first reaction was to try and make it to my own bed so my bleeding organs could kill me in peace.
I took a nap, which is always a good idea after a serious fall. The sleep I got, it was that dark and dreamless sleep that comes with head injury. It went on for hours. Unfortunately, when I woke up, the numbness had left me, and in its place was stiffness and a good deal of agony. I pushed through it though. I told myself that this was exactly how Batman would feel after a night of crime-fighting. Hurting this badly, it made me like Batman….EXACTLY like Batman, in fact.
You’d be surprised how much easier it was to cope with the pain while thinking that. It’s all about how you look at things, I guess. I wasn’t dead, nothing was broken, and even though I had gotten hurt really badly, I got out of that pool without anyone seeing my bare ass.
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