My mother asserts that this entire debacle was the result of improper footwear, whereas I think it was the booze.

Now before you get all pissy thinking I’m some disrespectful prick who doesn’t appreciate his mother, I wish to note that my mom reads this blog and gave me permission to tell this tale. She had a couple of drinks in her when I asked, but you’ve got to pick your moments.

My mother is a wonderful person. She’s so wonderful that she bought a gigantic summer place on a lovely island on the west coast of British Columbia that our family could vacation at each year. She’s a highly successful business woman and believes in not taking it with you, which I think is a healthy attitude, especially since it benefits me. Now it’s time for another side note: I wasn’t raised in wealth, so don’t go thinking I’m some silver spoon up the ass trust fund puke. My mother made the majority of her money after I finished high school.

Okay, back on track. The summer place. Booze. The “debacle.” I’ll get to it now.

It was six years ago and we were having a fire down on the beach, which is right in front of the guest house we stay in. It was after 8:00 and the sun was going down and my daughter, who was two at the time, was already in bed (thankfully). My son, who was almost five, was still up, and my seven-year-old niece was also on the beach with us. My wife, mother, step-father and best friend were all there as well.

My wife hardly drinks, but I’d had a few and my mom had had more than a few. On their property is a nice little section of coastal rainforest that my mom convinced the kids was a “magic forest” because it looks like something out of The Lord of the Rings. As darkness fell, my mother decided it would be a good time for her and my son and niece to take a walk through the “magic foresh.”

She semi-staggered to her feet, sloshing her glass of red wine and said, “Lesh take a walk in the magic foresh!”

So they did.

I forgot to mention the improper footwear. She had on some kind of flip flops with heels, and she was taking a walk in the dark through a forest path, and she had enough wine in her to trank a rhino. Well, she’ll take issue with that last comment. She wasn’t that drunk, but neither was she sober. Let’s leave it at that. Anyway, we should have seen that this had bad idea written all over it, but we weren’t paying attention.

A few minutes later my niece came running out: “Grandma fell and hurt herself!”

We were pretty stupid, because we didn’t really believe her at first. She’d had this little habit of crying wolf on us before and even though the situation seemed ripe for disaster we couldn’t comprehend that anything bad had really happened. So, we essentially called bullshit.

My niece got even more distressed and ran back into the forest, and so I figured I should probably go check things out just to play it safe. I walked through the forest and found my niece standing at the edge of a small ravine that had a trickle of a creek leading to the ocean. My mother was seated at the bottom of the ravine. My son was holding her hand. Mom was holding her hand to her face. There was blood everywhere.

“Uh,” I yelled back to the group. “I’m gonna need some help here!”

“She fell,” my son said, “and her wine glass hit her in the face.”

That didn’t quite register. “She, wait… WHAT?”

“I saw it,” he said. “She fell and her face landed right on her wine glass.”

Well, fuck. This was light years from being good.

Then my wife, friend and step-dad all show up. As I may have mentioned, my wife is a family physician and my friend was an EMT at the time (he’s a full-blown paramedic now). My dad used to be an emergency room doc in a small town. In fact, he asked my newly divorced mom out on a date while he was in the process of putting stitches into my seven-year-old foot. True story. However, he went into psychiatry shortly after that and hadn’t dealt with blood in almost 30 years. Coupled with the fact that he was seeing the love of his life in such a disastrous state, he kind of lost his shit.

Conversely, I’ve never met anyone who has their shit more together than my wife. Sure, she’ll flip out and start ripping things apart and stomping around if she can’t find her book, but in a crisis she is absolutely rock solid. She took control of the situation immediately, ordering my dad to go to the big house and get the first aid kit and bring it back to the beach. Realizing my wife and friend were best suited to handle medical trauma, he seemed happy to have a job to do, and dashed off.

My friend and I got my mother to her feet and walked her out of the forest and put her in a lawn chair then turned on some car headlights to get a look at the damage. She was a real mess. You know those UFC fights where a guy’s nose gets turned into hamburger? It was kind of like that, except in this case the hamburger got chewed up by a pit bull and then puked back out. Did I mention the blood? There was lots of blood.

My son never let go of her hand.

My dad showed up with the mother of all first aid kits. It was a case of serendipity that the previous year we’d had a discussion about how cut off we were from emergency medical care and that we should have a righteous first aid kit, so my mom gave my friend carte blanche to go buy everything he needed should a plane full of haemophiliacs crash into our house. After all, if you’re going to fuck yourself up in the middle of nowhere, having a doctor and an EMT with a shit-ton of medical goodies on hand can help mitigate the nastiness.

My dad still wasn’t ready to handle the situation, so my wife gave him another task: “Call the hospital and find out when the plastic surgeon is in.” She knew a lot about emergency room procedures and didn’t want a hack ER doc patching her together. My dad fled a second time, once again pleased to have something productive to do.

Then, with my friend as her aid, they started picking the chunks of glass, pebbles and dirt out of her nose.

My mom was stoic about the pain. She stayed completely still and never once complained about how much it hurt. She did start to get melancholy about how she was going to be all deformed though. If you ever wondered where my vanity comes from, I get it from my mother. She was worried she’d spend the rest of her days looking like a warthog. I tried to tell her it wasn’t that bad, and they’d be able to fix her all up no problem. I felt like a total liar though, because her nose was flayed wide open. It was like someone shoved a lit firecracker up each nostril. Not pretty.

My niece couldn’t take it, so she went to bed. Everyone else had a job to do, including my son who was busy holding her hand, except for me, so I gave myself one. She was wearing a T-shirt and shorts and her arms and legs were covered in blood, so I went and fetched a roll of paper towels and a bucket of warm water to wash all the blood off her. I figured it was going to have to come off sooner or later and it might make her feel better.

See? I’m not such a bad guy.

My dad came back and reported that the plastic surgeon wouldn’t be in until 8am the next day and my wife sent him back to tell them that she’d be there at eight and they needed to be ready for her. Then she turned to my friend: “We’ll prep her.”

They spent two hours on the beach, illuminated by car headlights, picking glass and rocks and dirt out of her nose, but the more she cleaned the worse my wife realized it was, so she opted to move her inside to finish the job.

We loaded my mom into her SUV and my wife, friend and son all went with her up to the main house to continue the surgery prep. I had to stay at the beach house because my daughter and niece were asleep there and I’d just be in the way of the medical professionals had I chosen to tag along.

It was 1am – a total of five hours of surgical prep – before my wife and son came home and she filled me in on the details: “It was a real mess, but we cleaned everything out that we could and then I Krazy Glued and Steri-stripped it closed then put a pressure pack on it. Your dad is taking her on the 7:00am ferry and the plastic surgeon is expecting her.”

Yes, she said Krazy Glue. Every first aid kit should have this. She has Krazy glued my thumb, my son’s forehead, and my daughter’s hip before. Don’t tell me these posts aren’t occasionally educational.

My son said at this point: “I held her hand the whole time.” What an awesome kid. He fell asleep as I carried him to his bed.

“So,” I said, “what’s the damage? How is she going to look?” I knew my mom was concerned about this. Really, who the Hell wouldn’t be? Would you want to go through the rest of your life looking like Schwarzenegger’s Predator?

“I can’t tell for sure. It depends on how good the plastic surgeon is. There was an arterial bleeder and I couldn’t get every last bit, so I wrote a note for the surgeon to let him know that there is still stuff in there. We’re just going to have to wait and see.”

To make a long story short, she ended up looking pretty damn good, all things considered. She received a roadmap of dozens of stitches through her nose, but the scarring is minimal. If you didn’t know the story you’d probably never even notice the scars. I know they’re there and have to be within two feet to see them. The shape of her nose is exactly what it was before. Needless to say, my wife, friend, and son all earned hero status with my mom that day. The plastic surgeon sang their praises as well, asserting that they had done all the really hard work and were the reason why she was going to look fine.

The nose was the major injury, but she also had a small gash in her knee from the fall. I mention this because a couple of days later my daughter was sitting on her lap and said, “Grandma, why is your knee all hot?”

My wife heard this and jumped to her feet. After a brief inspection she asserted that the cut on my mom’s knee was infected. “You have two options,” she said. “We can spend the next couple of hours ferrying you to the hospital, then you can sit in the waiting room for several hours, then they’ll freeze it and clean it all out and bandage it up, then a couple more hours to come home.”

“What’s the other option?” my mom asked.

“I do it now, with no freezing, and it takes fifteen minutes.”

“Do it.”

“It’s going to hurt.”

“I don’t care. All I need is my grandson to hold my hand.”