Chapter 1 - First Break
I guess I should start with the fact that this was not the first time I broke my neck. When I was 17 and a junior in high school in St. Louis Missouri, we were running baseball drills in the second-floor wrestling practice room. Both the walls and the floor were tiled with that awful 2-inch-thick vinyl padding, which gives you just enough confidence to be a real dumb ass but not enough padding to save you from yourself. Falling directly in line with that, my friend Dan R. and I had drifted away from the baseball drills we were supposed to be doing and were doing that half ass wrestling where nobody really goes full out. At some point I found myself in a body lock with his arms around my hips lifting me up. That should’ve been it, that should’ve been game over, his win… But no, I had to try to get out of it and try to rotate. Problem was, I didn’t know what he was doing and he didn’t know what I was doing and I quickly ended up upside down with him dropping me back down to the ground. BANG! I landed on the back of my head with the rest of my body coming straight down, slamming my chin into my chest and folding me in half. The world went silent for a moment, followed by a loud ringing noise, which slowly faded to reveal the sound of my own labored breathing; thinking back, the sound was oddly similar to the sound in movies and TV they use right after a bomb goes off and the character can’t hear. I laid there, not knowing what to do, or even if I was actually hurt. I’d been hit in the head a fair number of times in my life, I was a fairly injury prone child, but I had always remained conscious. This time felt different, I felt like I might’ve lost a step, I couldn’t quite breathe, and the back of my neck felt like I had been in a car accident (something I have experienced as both passenger and driver an odd number of times).
So, there I was, laying on those gross gray mats, with my teammates standing around trying to figure out what we were going to do. We couldn’t just go to the coach and say, “hey we were just fucking around and maaayyybe just broke Kenji’s neck???” Given that you had to take your shoes off to enter the wrestling room, and just outside of the room was the staircase down to the main gym floor, we thought, maybe we can drag my body down the stairs, stage the scene, and tell the coach someone was throwing me my shoe and I fell down the stairs? Over the course of freaking out and debating what to do, my hearing had come back, I was able to breathe again, and I seem to be able to move okay. I decided to gingerly walk down to the coach’s office and own up to what happened, but to try to leave Dan out of the story somehow. Well, after telling him what happened, being a responsible adult, coach Craig Sucher recognized the fact that I could have a spinal cord injury and brought me to the small nurse’s office, just off of the main gym. After hearing what happened and how I came down, the nurse called the paramedics; better safe than sorry.
The paramedics arrived and put my neck in a C collar as they examined me and asked me questions. They basically thought there was no chance I broke my neck; I would only be speculating as to how they came to that conclusion but I assume it was the fact that I had no obvious neurologic symptoms. But, just to be safe, they put me on the backboard, up on to the stretcher and out to the ambulance as groups of kids leaving school and heading into the parking lot watched on in curiosity.
