Priest’s Confessions | Columnists | Summerville Journal Scene

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Priest’s Confessions

Published Wednesday, July 23, 2008 1:02 PM

By Ellen Priest
Summerville Journal Scene ®

It could only happen to you…

My husband has spoken these words to me many times over the lifetime of our marriage.

Unfortunately, he’s right. I seem to get myself into some unusual situations.

This time I was standing on a boat, in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, with 50 strangers, when disaster struck. A bad situation.

Over the years, I have been in many.

There was the time that I went to a demonstration of rockets at my daughter’s middle school.

The kids had built the rockets in science class and the whole eighth grade and their parents turned out for the launching.

It was a good day, until one rocket went errant and came plummeting back to earth.

I ran, as did everyone else, while trying to protect my daughter and her friends from the falling object. Out of all of those hundreds of running people, guess who it hit?

It could only happen to me.

The rocket hit me squarely in the back of the head.

In my dazed condition, I only remember seeing a student pick the rocket up off the ground and comment in amazement that there was a whole clump of my hair still attached to it.

I drove to my son’s school to pick him up while trying to staunch the bleeding on the back of my head.

No stitches were involved, but it took a while for the bleeding to stop.

I’ve had a neurologist tell me that he never looked for mononucleosis in a 35-year old woman because it simply didn’t happen. I was the first case he had seen in forty years of practice.

It could only happen to me.

When my thyroid stopped working after my son’s birth, I found out that I was in the point one percent (yes, that’s .1%) of women with this condition whose thyroid did not start working again later.

So, getting back to the disaster at sea …

All I had done was move and I felt my bikini top snap. I thought it had come undone. I quickly grabbed the back of it and asked my husband to re-hook it. The strange look on his face told me I was in a lot of trouble.

He said, “It’s broken.”

That’s when the panic set in. I said, “Broke, broke?” He said yes.

I threw on his tee shirt, wiggled out of the top and verified that it was indeed broke, broke.

I turned to one of the ship’s crew for help, but they had none. They said this had never happened before.

I searched frantically through my belongings for anything to fix it with, but found no solution.

My husband did the same with his backpack and came up with two of the rustiest safety pins you ever saw in an old medical kit.

They could have been made of gold the way he held them triumphantly in his hand.

Luckily, I had a tetanus shot last year.

So, as the ship weighed anchor and the other occupants donned masks and goggles to jump off to begin snorkeling, I jury-rigged my bathing suit into a bathing suit once more and in the manner that only another woman can understand, managed to wiggle back into it, while standing on deck in my husband’s tee shirt.

I said a little prayer several times while in the water snorkeling that day that those rusty safety pins would hold.

Which they did. Disaster averted.

At least until next time.

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