The Accident
Jack and Joleen had been happily married for six years when one day Jack looked up from his riding lawn mower and noticed a couple of loose shingles on the roof. He finished mowing and parked the mower nose-in right in front of the house underneath the loose shingles as a marker. He went inside to get a hammer and nails.
Joleen was lounging on the couch and binge watching The Real Housewives of Orange County when he came inside. She looked up and said, “That Vicki! What a hot mess! I just love her! Watcha doin’, hon?”
“I noticed some loose shingles on the roof while I was mowing and need to hammer them back into place.”
“Oh, Jack, don’t you dare! You’re such a klutz! Remember that time you tried to change the oil in the car, and we wound up taking you to the emergency room?”
“Don’t you worry none, darlin’, I’ll show you. Come hold the ladder while I get up on the roof. That’s how safe I’m gonna be. I’ll show you.”
Joleen sighed and went with him to get the ladder. She never could talk any sense into him when he decided he had to do manly man stuff. At least she’d hold the ladder and watch him go up. He had the hammer and nails in his little work apron so the nails wouldn’t scatter all over the place.
Jack climbed onto the roof – “See! No problem!” He walked to where he had parked the mower and crouched down to find the loose shingles and spotted them. It turned out there were loose shingles he hadn’t noticed behind the loose shingles he did notice, and he lost his footing. As he tumbled forward, time slowed down, way down. As he passed the gutters, he saw leaves in the gutters and made a mental note to clean them out. Then he looked up and saw the riding lawn mower, getting closer and closer and he studied the grain on the seat. The next thing he knew, he was lying flat on the ground.
“Jack!” Joleen shrieked as she ran toward him. “I should never have let you get up on the roof! I knew it, I just knew it! Say something, darling, say something!” She helped him sit up.
“Valvoline 10-40. Valvoline 10-40. Valvoline 10-40. Red screw top. Valvoline 10-40. Valvoline 10…”
“Valvo what? Oh, the motor oil.” She looked him over and couldn’t find any cuts, bumps, or bruises. She helped him stand up, which he did without any signs of wooziness or balance issues.
Just the strange talk. “Come on, buster, to the emergency room. Again.”
At the ER entrance, a nurse put him in a wheelchair and as she wheeled him away, Joleen kept hearing him say, “Red screw top. Valvoline 10-40. Maybe Valvoline 10-30. Maybe Quaker State. Quakers make oil. Quaker State 10…”
She hadn’t been sitting in the waiting room very long when a doctor approached her.
“Hello, my name is Dr. Bones. We found no physical signs of the impact of the fall. Just the strange obsessive, incessant talk about motor oil. We’ll need to keep him in the hospital for several days for observation and run a battery of tests. Oh, and another strange thing – the attending nurses said he sounds just like Elvis Presley. I must admit, after they brought it up, I thought so too.”
Over the next several days, Jack underwent MRI scans, CT scans, brain scans, electrocardiograms, brain x-rays, brain ultrasounds, fluoroscopy, and a colonoscopy just in case some kind of rectal blockage was restricting oxygen or something to the brain somehow. The colonoscopy was a stretch, sure, but none of the scanning and imaging technologies had revealed anything other than normal functioning of the brain. Some of the results might have been suspect because Jack just wouldn’t stop talking so they had to tape his mouth shut – even then they heard muffled sounds from him. The last scan technician wrote “won’t shut his fat trap up” in her notes about him.
Word of Jack’s peculiar condition spread quickly through the medical community – a head-first accident with no sign of physical, structural, or neurological damage, just the unusual obsessive speech pattern that meandered from coherent to wild, speculative tangents and back again, while all the time somehow remaining on topic. Jack’s case brought Livingston County Hospital a certain kind of fame with coverage by local media and even a couple of cable channels. The hospital administration decided to keep Jack confined while several specialists and medical researchers came to investigate, all of whom invariably left shaking their heads, clueless as to the cause of Jack’s verbal diarrhea. The Netflix series Unsolved Mysteries even did an episode on his case.
During his rather lengthy stay, nurses continued routine checks on Jack. At first, they’d smile and nod patiently as he rambled on. To take just one example, he started by talking about motor oil as usual. Then the motor oil somehow made him think of the Ford Edsel with its push-button shift changes on the dashboard and that became his topic of choice until he moved on to the Japanese taking over the auto industry and then on to industrial policy and global trade, all the while his rambling unencumbered by the fact that he knew virtually nothing about any of them. Each nurse visit similarly started invariably with him talking about motor oil followed by a loosely related stream-of-consciousness talk.
Joleen couldn’t help but notice that before long a different nurse each time one came to check on him and that their visits became cursory, shorter and shorter until they virtually ran in and then ran out of his room even as he droned on about nursing things like uniforms and where are the hats, which made him wonder where were the Nuns shuffling around the hospital in their habits, which made him think of The Handmaid’s Tale and were they Nuns or what, and could Nuns become pregnant after all, and what kind of motor oil did they use in their cars and did they change the oil themselves and wind up in hospitals, and where is Canada anyway, and why couldn’t they bring maple syrup with the breakfast oatmeal, which made him think of Quaker Oats, which made him think of Quaker State motor oil, et cetera, et cetera, and so on, ad nauseum.
As the attending physician, Dr. Bones came regularly to try to explain test results and expert observations, but Jack just took them as departure points for his ramblings which were more or less related to what the good doctor was trying to tell him, such as the coloscopy made him think of diarrhea and he needed more fiber in his diet and why don’t they bring Quaker Oatmeal with maple syrup which led him to talk about Quaker State oil and why do they have all these different kinds like 10-30 and 10-40 and 5-20 which made him think of stock car racing and Richard Petty and so on.
Dr. Bones tried to be patient but as the days wore on, his visits too became shorter and shorter. After the first week, Joleen noticed him becoming paler and more haggard with each visit, his shoulders slumping further and further. Sometimes she caught him jerking his head slightly sideways and slurring slightly.
After about three weeks, a nurse came into the room and motioned for Joleen to come outside where Dr. Bones was waiting for her. His face twitched. He cleared his throat and grimaced. “Mrs. Lack…”
“Ms. Lack,” she interrupted.
“S-sorry, Ms. … Ms. … well, we think J-jack can go, go home now.” He grimaced again.
“Now?!” Joleen exclaimed, “Why now?”
“S-sorry, f-follow me.”
She followed him down the hall until they stopped at a door with a plaque titled Hospital Administrator, and a name plaque underneath for Dr. Sarah Hawke. Dr. Bones knocked. “You may let yourself in,” came a voice behind the door.fo4
Dr. Bones opened the door and motioned for Joleen to go in and quickly closed the door behind her.
“Joleen Lack. May I call you Joleen?” Dr. Hawke asked.
“Um, yes.” Joleen felt nervous in the presence of this imposing tall woman in black cat-eye glasses . a conservative black suit with a silk blouse, and her hair pulled back into a severe blonde bun.
“Well, Joleen, I’ve reviewed your husband’s charts and have talked with each of the specialists who have come to see him.. Physically, he’s as healthy as a horse. Brain scans have not revealed anything abnormal. The charts note he has been talking less obsessively about motor oil and has been bringing up new topics such as toilet bowl design and water drainage patterns. He’s also exhibiting curiosity such as why nurses don’t wear white hats anymore, and why doctors don’t wear those headbands with metal disks anymore. Oh, and we believe his priapism will subside. Eventually. It doesn’t seem to bother him that much, which is unusual. You could take advantage of that.”
Dr. Hawke lowered her glasses and looked directly at Joleen.
“In addition, you may have noticed Dr. Bones has developed a speech impediment and a nervous tic. That began shortly after he started seeing your husband. Also, nurses are routinely asking to be reassigned after they’ve seen your husband and a few have actually quit.
In short, we believe it’s both in the interests of your husband’s health and our hospital staff’s well-being that he be released today. We have proactively set up appointments with a psychiatrist and a psychologist to see what they might be able to do to help.”
Joleen was flabbergasted. She knew Jack wasn’t quite right still. Yes, he brought up different topics now, but he was obsessed with them too. “But … but…,” she sputtered, “what about me?”
“Oh, I’m sure you’ll adjust. He’ll get better, we assume.” Dr. Hawke led Joleen to the door and let her out even as she continued sputtering, “But…but…”
She turned from the door and there was Jack in a wheelchair with a nurse smiling nervously behind him.
“…so these nurses’ white hats, you’d see them in the old movies, with the white brim snapped up smartly and going across the nurse’s forehead. How’d they make those things, anyway? They must’ve starched the hell out of those brims or maybe they put cardboard in or reinforced with steel or maybe they made them out of plaster, anyway nurses looked …”
And away they went down the hall.
Copyright © Johnny Clack 2022
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