I can't remember exactly when it was - the summer of 2003, maybe? We were living in American Fork while Jeremy worked on his master's degree and I worked at a couple of jobs. Somehow he ended up playing on an intramural flag football team at the BYU. I know they make it flag football so it's not as brutal or dangerous as regular football, but it was still plenty risky to play. A little while before Jeremy's incident, a BYU student died on the intramural field after falling and landing on his head and breaking his neck (if I remember correctly, and I can't find any archived news stories to back me up).
At this particular early-evening game, during the course of regular play, Jeremy's face came into sudden, forced contact with the head of a large Pacific Islander. Jeremy's mouth took the brunt of the impact and his front teeth went all the way through his upper lip. At first he thought he was fine, but when blood started gushing from his mouth, we all realized that he wasn't. He took off his shirt to staunch the bleeding and pretty much soaked it.
I was at the game, so I was able to drive him to Urgent Care. We spent about 30 minutes in the waiting room before being shown back to see a doctor, only to be told that "uuuuuhh, that is way too serious for us to take care of here." Thanks. They did us the favor of calling the local ER to tell them Jeremy would be coming in, and they said that they weren't busy at all and there shouldn't even be a wait once we arrived.
So we headed over to the ER...and passed the wreckage of a fairly major car accident on the way, complete with ambulances, with sirens blaring, that beat us to the hospital. We ended up waiting for a pretty long time for Jeremy to be seen.
They stitched him up pretty well and clarified that Urgent Care could have done the same thing, but the doctors at the hospital were better qualified to do a cleaner, more cosmetic job of it. Jeremy left the ER with a lot of high-dose ibuprofen and a very fat upper lip.
The point of this story is that for some reason, we decided to take some pictures of Jeremy exaggerating his fat lip. I mean, it was fat, but it was not as fat as this:
or this:
All in good fun. To this day, Jeremy has a small scar on his upper lip. We figured out later that he would have bashed in his front teeth for sure if he hadn't had a permanent retainer wired in there. And he doesn't play any sports these days without wearing a mouth guard. Because you never know when a Pacific Islander's skull is going to shove its way into your upper lip.
At this particular early-evening game, during the course of regular play, Jeremy's face came into sudden, forced contact with the head of a large Pacific Islander. Jeremy's mouth took the brunt of the impact and his front teeth went all the way through his upper lip. At first he thought he was fine, but when blood started gushing from his mouth, we all realized that he wasn't. He took off his shirt to staunch the bleeding and pretty much soaked it.
I was at the game, so I was able to drive him to Urgent Care. We spent about 30 minutes in the waiting room before being shown back to see a doctor, only to be told that "uuuuuhh, that is way too serious for us to take care of here." Thanks. They did us the favor of calling the local ER to tell them Jeremy would be coming in, and they said that they weren't busy at all and there shouldn't even be a wait once we arrived.
So we headed over to the ER...and passed the wreckage of a fairly major car accident on the way, complete with ambulances, with sirens blaring, that beat us to the hospital. We ended up waiting for a pretty long time for Jeremy to be seen.
They stitched him up pretty well and clarified that Urgent Care could have done the same thing, but the doctors at the hospital were better qualified to do a cleaner, more cosmetic job of it. Jeremy left the ER with a lot of high-dose ibuprofen and a very fat upper lip.
The point of this story is that for some reason, we decided to take some pictures of Jeremy exaggerating his fat lip. I mean, it was fat, but it was not as fat as this:
or this:
All in good fun. To this day, Jeremy has a small scar on his upper lip. We figured out later that he would have bashed in his front teeth for sure if he hadn't had a permanent retainer wired in there. And he doesn't play any sports these days without wearing a mouth guard. Because you never know when a Pacific Islander's skull is going to shove its way into your upper lip.