Head + Concrete = Concussion

Things I have in common with Ben Roethlisberger, NFL Pro Quarterback:

1) Both our last names start with an 'R'
2) We've both been knocked unconscious and suffered a concussion recently
3) We've both won a Super Bowl.

One of these facts is untrue.

So last night at dodgeball I was definitely unconscious for between a minute and two minutes. I went up to catch a ball, bounced off another player, and then as I came down something inexplicable happened.

My feet missed the ground.

The rest of me, sadly, did not.

The sound of my head hitting the carpet-covered concrete has been described as a 'schmush', a 'thunk', or, and in my opinion this is the most descriptive account, 'the most disgusting noise I have ever heard.'

Now I just remember lying there for about thirty seconds, with the wind totally knocked out of me, unable to think straight, but with my eyes open. Turns out I was down for a good couple of minutes, with my eyes closed, and was totally unresponsive. Pretty scary. The weirdest part of all this is that the things I remember as a continuous stream of events actually occurred over several minutes, with big gaps in between.

The real kicker is the concussion, though. Since then, I keep getting weird headaches and rushes of blood to my head. My hearing will fade in and out, I'll feel randomly nauseous, and standing up too quickly is really weird.

On the plus side, I'm done with all with all my classes, and all my finals were in-class, so I really have nothing better to do than sleep and sit around doing nothing....which is really all I feel capable of doing right now.

Initial Report from Champaign-Urbana

So I've been here for a week now.

And it's pretty darn awesome.

If you ever come to the UofI - the first thing you'll notice is the obscene size of everything. There is a fully-fledged gym in my halls, and a bowling alley in the union. There are about 40,000 students here, pretty much all of whom are from Illinois. On my floor I appear to be the only foreign student, which means I have both novelty value, and an excuse for doing anything wrong - wonderful!

I've registered for a scant twelve hours of classes, three of which are in 'Fundamentals of Acting 1', which seems a bit ridiculous, but never mind.

My halls are, perversely, absolutely freezing - the air conditioning seems to be turned up to a ridiculous amount. This meant that I had the very odd experience of buying a very thick insulated blanket from WalMart in the middle of summer. (There are three WalMarts in Champaign-Urbana, by the way, all of which are bigger than the city of Durham.)

Continuing with the 'insanely big' theme - my church in Edinburgh is around three hundred strong. My church here is something like 2500! They have a gym...inside their church. Utter madness.

However, they are all really cool, and I got on with them really well. I think I'm improving on my record from first year in Edinburgh, where I knew very few people, and almost none in my halls. So far, I've got to know a load of people on my floor really well, and we're looking at starting an intramural soccer team. It's shaping up to be a really awesome year.