Kids Do The Darndest Things

It has been a long, fulfilling, draining four days in the Emergency Department. I get to see some of the silly things kids do to themselves, worrying the heck out of their parents, when I am reminded of:

The Not-So-Amazing Adventures of SuperKhuen, Boy Wander, Aged Nine

There is one church camp up in Cameron Highlands that is forever burned into my memory. We were staying with the church at the Highlands' Christian Centre, a place with both dormitories and family rooms ideal for church camps.

One night, when everyone was having dinner in the dining hall, I had finished my dinner early, and ran off to the dormitories to do a bit of adventuring by myself.

The edifice stood before me, majestic - it was a triple decker bed towering about two metres, the top bed so close to the ceiling you could kick it.

My chubby little legs excitedly scaled the ladders to the topmost bunks, and I clambered onto the beds, the fluorescent lights just out of reach of my head. I bounced around the bed excitedly, extremely pleased with how well the adventure was going.

These beds, considering their height from the floor, were actually fairly dangerous ones - there were the nominal railings by the side, and these did not even run along the whole of the bed, but halfway, just enough to prevent the sleeping person from dying in his sleep. (I had a dream that I was falling, and then I woke up. Dead.)

My curiosity and foolhardiness told me to go to the edge of the bed and look down. And so I crept, half smiling in anticipation, and peered over the edge of the bed.

That's when Gravity suddenly grabbed me by my shoulders, hurtling me towards the concrete floor below.


[and so we have F=ma,

where F is the force

m is the mass of the fat kid

and a being the acceleration, in this case, gravity, g, which is a constant 9.81 ms-2.

We have F= 50kg x 9.81 ms-2 = 490.5 N = Very Ouch. ]


It was like I was the apple, and the floor was Isaac Newton. A cold, hard, unfeeling, Isaac Newton.

Luckily, my neck broke my fall.

Now don't get me wrong - I taught the cement floor a lesson as well. That will teach it to mess with an overweight nine year old kid.

Who am I kidding - I am surprised that I didn't black out completely. God knew I needed a thick skull when he made me in my mother's womb.

I somehow made my way out of the dormitory room, and the world was spinning in a beautiful merry-go-round. I walked out clumsily, punch drunk from my bout with the floor, and staggered across the gravel paths to my parents' room.

I had a run-in with a parked car, which stood in my drunken pathway to their room. The car alarm went off, exacerbating my already sore head, and so I valiantly kicked the protesting car. There were two Indian girls nearby, and they watched me in guarded surprise, wondering who had given this poor child some samsu.

I somehow managed to get to my parents' room, and finally collapsed onto the bed, the world only stopping to turn when I had my eyes closed.

Mercifully, there was someone in the dormitory where I had my skullbreaking fall, and he had reported the incident to the church elders. ("The poor concrete, who had done nothing to harm this boy, has just been assaulted by his head.")

They found me - my worried mum, and auntie JH, and uncle Gerald. My mum kept asking me if I was all right, and uncle Gerald swept me up in his arms, and carried me into his Volvo, and drove off into the night in search of a clinic.

The doctor examined me and told them I was going to be okay. They brought me back to the campsite, reassured now that there wasn't any additional risk of stupidity in an already fairly silly child.

The rest of the camp was vivid in my mind for other reasons - my parents' room won the inauspicious dirtiest room of the camp award (maybe because of my blood stains all over the place?) and I gave a card to Uncle Gerald, thanking him for bringing me to the doctor that night.

Poor Uncle Gerald ended up in a neck brace and an arm sling later. Apparently, after the adrenaline wears off, the consequences of carrying a child the size of a baby elephant will become apparent.

Oh well - months of neck and back pain for a badly drawn thank-you card = fair deal.