Ceiling Fan

I’m notorious for wrestling with my boys. Anyone who knows me or is familiar with my family knows that my reputation for wrestling with my boys precedes me. When my boys were little, I believe we probably wrestled in some manner every day. And that’s not an exaggeration. We would have the most incredible battles. Sometimes they would dress up in whatever wrestling attire they could make work. They would even have their own entrance music complete with masks and championship belts (pretty sad huh?) Our old house had a huge living room so they would cordon it off and make a wrestling ring out of ace bandages in it. We would even have cage matches. We would put a baby gate up in the doorway to the family room. Whoever could make it over the top of the ‘cage’ first would win. There was no end to my boy’s creativity when it came time to wrestle. My personal favorites were the ‘foreign objects’ they used to hid in their ‘trunks’ or around the ‘ring’. It would be anything from a Hot-Wheels car stuffed in their shorts to a strategically placed whiffel ball bat hidden under the couch. They would use anything thing that they could to try gain the advantage over me and win the match.

Now as they get older we still wrestle, but not nearly as much as we used to. It’s not as much fun when the kids can put up a legitimate fight. I liked it better when I could dominate and control the matches. Now I can’t, especially when they decide to double team the old man. I simply get an old fashioned butt kicking. No doubt that I deserve it and I expect no sympathy (Lana). And after you read, there is no doubt that you’ll agree that I did/do need my butt kicked for what I’ve done. But I’m just at the age where I’m afraid of getting seriously injured. And believe me; we have had our share of injuries. Without a doubt, the worst injury by far was the ceiling fan. I got in a lot of trouble with this one. Actually I still think I’m in trouble over this one.

It was early Saturday morning and Katlin and I were watching TV in our bedroom. Kat was probably about six or seven years old at the time. As often happened, we would be lying on the bed watching TV and we would start wrestling. We would play “King of the Bed”, the object being to keep the other guy off the bed. From there it turned into a full-on fight for survival. Now we when fought we prided ourselves on being able to ‘put moves’ on the other guys. Not just beating on each other but proving to the other that we indeed had skills. I decided I wanted to put a move on Katlin. Kat and I were fighting and he was on the floor next to the bed. I sat on the side of the bed and leaned over to pick him up. This is where things go horribly wrong. I picked him up and decided to suplex him. This is where I lift him up over my head and he lands on his back on the bed. Unfortunately for Katlin, I forgot that he had grown and that there was a ceiling fan above our bed. When I executed my move I threw Kat feet first into the globes on the ceiling fan. Fortunately he had socks on it could have been much worse. But it did cut the bottom of his right foot. I’ll spare you the gory details but it was a pretty bad gash. It was so bad that I immediately realized that he needed to go to the emergency room.

As luck would have it, Kathy was not home at the time, she was at a ladies retreat on the beach that our old church was hosting. She was going to be home later that afternoon and then we were all supposed to go to Tallahassee to see ice hockey. I rushed Kat to the emergency room and they began working on him. This was not just a cut on the bottom of his foot but an actual chunk of flesh was missing. In order to fix this they had to put him under using general anesthesia. Not good. Now I had to explain to the hospital what happened thinking all the time that child services was going to come take my child away. But then I became fearful of telling my wife what happened. We didn’t have cell phones back then so I had to call the hotel where the retreat was being held and they had to track her down. I called my wife and explained to her what I had done to her child and where we were at. Telling your wife that you have screwed up royally and hurt her youngest child is not an easy thing to do. It was one of the most embarrassing and difficult things I’ve ever had to do. I also don't think Kathy particularly liked telling all the ladies at the retreat that she needed to leave because her bone-headed husband tossed her child into the ceiling fan. The looks I got from those ladies the following Sunday were downright nasty. If looks could kill I would have been dead fifty times over. None of them talked to me for a month. Ever piss off fifty 'church ladies'? Not a wise thing to do. I was defiently on the outside looking in.

After working on Katlin for quite awhile the doctors realized they could not sew his foot up because there was really nothing to sew. It would just have to heal naturally. They put a huge bandage on the bottom of Kat’s foot. Problem was that it prevented his foot from draining properly. Because of this the bottom of his foot became one huge blood blister. Every time his little heart would beat the bottom of his foot would thump. In the middle of the night we had to take him back to the emergency room and have it looked at again. The doctors realized what they had done and drained his foot, finally giving Kat some relief from the pain. Ultimately, his foot healed without any problems and Kat now has a nasty scar on the bottom of his foot to show for it. As you can imagine, I felt incredibly guilty and terrible for a really, really long time afterwards (which I should of). For the longest time afterwards I would not wrestle with the boys because I was afraid of hurting them. That is until Kat’s foot got better and he enlisted help from his brother to launch a full scale sneak attack on me to get retribution for what I had done. I deserved it and I took my punishment….big-time.