A Near-Death Experience

"Mom, did you hear I almost died in the shower?" Bantam13 asked me on Saturday afternoon.

"What??" I questioned.

"Well, I slipped and hit my head, and I was sort of asleep for a few minutes because..."

I interrupted, "Then you've had another concussion! Honey, you need to take it easy for a few days, like you had to before."

"Then I can't go running with Dad in the morning on Monday? We're trying to get back on our schedule," he explained. (For the last six weeks, they've been getting up before 6 to either run or work out; then they do Morning Prayer together. He's been loving this time with his dad.)

"Well, we'll see how you are, but I think it would probably be better to wait another day or so," I replied, recalling a newspaper clipping my mother, a nurse, had sent me after the other incident. It had emphasized that concussions, as a sports injury, are often underdiagnosed and way undertreated--kids are often sent right back onto the playing field, or expected back at practice the next day, although they may have had a serious brain injury. "I'll talk to Dad," I assured him.

I thought that was the end of the story, but later I heard him telling one of his siblings, "...and I was sort of asleep for a little while, but then I woke up and my lungs were full of water and I kind of threw up water, and then I could breathe."

"What??" I asked, for the second time that day.

"Yeah, I didn't get to tell you that part."

"Then--you really did--almost die in the shower?" I said inanely, as comprehension and something greater than thankfulness washed over me.

Later on that night, he vomited up a little more water, and on Sunday, he had a headache most of the day.

It turns out that while he was still overheated from the six-mile run he had enjoyed with his dad, he had taken a cool shower. Papa Rooster guesses that the blood rushed to warm his extremities, causing him to faint. "When you start to feel light-headed, you know you need to sit down and put your head between your knees, right?" he asked.

"Oh...no, I didn't know that. Yeah, I was starting to see blackness, kind of, just before I fell, and I wondered if I should sit down or something...."

Thank you, Lord, for preserving our son's life!