headaches

One evening as I lay down approaching sleep: it would be filled with the gentle pounding footsteps of charging dogs alerted by the wind blowing in the trees, the smell of secondhand smoke from a guard on nightly rounds of monotony, pigs wailing at the same thing as the dogs unless they were getting the business end of the slaughter man’s knife, and the hounds barking in the distance practicing for their performance at the Royal Albert Hall in the heart of London, I tuned in to a curious news item on Radio Netherlands International.  Yes, I know: exciting nightlife.  Without question it was the most peculiar and therefore most memorable news report I have ever heard.

It seems a man from on the former Russian republics maybe Latvia or Lithuania turned up a local hospital complaining about persistent headaches.  Nothing extraordinary except what followed.  After an examination the man was taken for x-rays and then immediately to surgery.  It seems that this unfortunate fellow required the emergency removal of a bullet from his skull.  Upon questioning from his doctors the man could only recall how, one New Year’s Eve some three to five years earlier, he had been hit in the head by some unknown object while crossing a street filled with merry and apparently rowdy revelers.  It had not occurred to the man, who quite clearly had consumed an excessive amount of alcohol that he’d been shot during the festivities.  More incredibly, in the days to follow he didn’t recall having a wound or needing to clean it out.  His scalp healed over the bullet during the weeks and months to come and still he hadn’t noticed even the smallest heretofore bump, bulge, or protrusion in his head that wasn’t there before until he began having the debilitating headaches.  He hadn’t the slightest notion or memory of what had happened to him that fateful New Year’s Eve.