Oct 4, 2011

American TV: Ben fell on his head

When I worked for American Television I often found it quite desirable to take Marie with me on the days that I traveled to the farther reaches of my area of responsibility. Since Ben was born just a few months after our marriage that was not always possible because of the fact that it was harder on him to travel all day and have the need to taken care of while I was in a home repairing a TV set. However after he was a little over a year old I took Marie and Ben with me on one of my trips to Price. Ben had started to walk when he was just over 9 months old so it was no problem for him to stand up and even move around and have fun while I was working. We had a fairly busy day that day but still were done and ready to return home around 4 pm that evening. My last call was in Helper so after I was finished we decided to stop at a small hamburger place in Helper for supper before returning to Mapleton.  We were of course in the Van I used for TV repair. It was a Ford Van. I got out of the van and swung the door shut. It was during the summer so I also had the window rolled down as we traveled to keep the van cool since there was no air conditioning in it. Marie and Ben stayed in the van while I went to the window to order. Marie let Ben stand up on my seat to watch and he then moved over to the door and grabbed on to the door so he could look out the open window. At that instance we discovered that I hadn’t gotten the door closed enough and it swung open and Ben fell out of the van from on the seat of the driver’s side. Since he had been holding onto the door as it swung open he fell forward and thus landed on the cement on his head. I can’t remember to this day if I ever got the food or not because the next thing I clearly remember is arriving at the Price Hospital with Marie holding him and waiting in the Emergency Room for just a little over an hour before a Doctor even looked at him. We often have thought since then that we should have just gone on to Spanish Fork since it would have been roughly the same amount of time. However Ben proved to be pretty tough since when they did finally look at him they simply told us that he had a minor concussion and to watch his eyes and not let him sleep for more than 10 minutes at a time and to simply just keep checking his eyes and see if they ever became dilated since that would be the indicator that there might be further complications.

We left for home and after arriving an hour or so later could not find any problems and Ben recovered with no problems, at least none that we could detect. We have often kidded him about being very hard headed.