MICHAEL & HEATHER COLLETTO

Nelson Mandela once said, “If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.”

I think he added later–although it is often left out of the original quotation–that attempting to go to bed with a mosquito in the room “will make Heather Colletto weep faster than anything.” Something like that.

NOTE: This post is about a strangely eventful night prior to my back injury.  I didn’t post it at the time because I didn’t want to worry my parents with a silly little story about a minor concussion, but now, given my recent spine surgery in Bangkok, I feel like we can all use the opportunity to laugh about the night Michael abandoned me and a Tokay attacked.  Well, that’s my version of the story, anyway. Shall we proceed? OK.

I was falling asleep in bed when a mosquito buzzed in my ear ever so briefly.  I awoke completely and immediately.  (This emotional hatred for the noisy nuisance of a mosquito buzzing goes back to the first month I lived alone in Slovakia in 2006. I’d taken the bus across town to watch “World Trade Center” by myself on 9/11, then missed the last bus home, resulting in a very long, lonely–and yes, tearful–night in a seedy hostel with the company of such a mosquito.)  Beneath the blue canopy of our mosquito netting, I lay still with my eyes wide open, daring it to come back, seducing it into my trap by willpower alone.  But it was silent, and I began to wonder if maybe I had dreamed it or had misheard Mike’s cell phone vibrating in the other room.

I drifted back to sleep, then: buzzzzzz.  This time, hyper-vigilant and determined not to be duped again, I flew out of bed, wove an arm through the mosquito netting’s (apparently faulty) opening, and flipped on the lights.  I was going to lie awake until I could see the little bugger with mine own eyes and slap him into oblivion.  This breach of my sanctuary would not be tolerated.  As I pulled my arm away from the light switch and flung myself back into bed, I sort of miscalculated my positioning.

TWHUMP!

Instead of hitting my pillow, my head hit our psuedo-bookshelf headboard right on its edge.  Pain erupted from the bottom of my skull and invaded my head, pushing tears out my eyes.  I moaned.

That is really all I remember, but that is what husbands are for.  Most of the following is Mike’s rendering.

Michael had been working out in the main room at his desk.  He’d been fighting a pesky head cold for a few days so he’d just decided to pop a Tylenol PM and was getting ready to come to bed when he heard the bang.  He listened in the silence to make sure I was okay, then heard the moan, then more silence, then a small voice saying, “Michael…?”  When he came into the room and asked what happened, apparently, I told him I had hit my head.  Seeing how I was lying in bed, it was unclear to Michael exactly how I had hit my head, but his further questioning was met only with my blank, silent stares out the window.  And some babbling about a mosquito. Uh oh.

Now, Michael is very proud of the A he got in his First Aid course in college, and he is always quick to add it was a very difficult course.  So he knew that, given our lack of decent health insurance–oh, how little we knew–the time of night, and our current home in the middle of a rice field in Thailand, the best thing to do for a suspected concussion was to keep me awake for four or five hours so that I didn’t, oh, you know, fall asleep and slip into a coma.

As Michael explained the seriousness of head injuries, I kept making vague statements about a mosquito, then alternated between crying and yelling and laughing for the next hour.  This only confirmed his belief that I had done a little bit of damage to my head and needed to be kept awake.  But, about that time, his Tylenol PM kicked in.  His eyes drooped as mine opened wide in a deep betrayal.

“Ship Captain Redlegs!” I yelled. (I’d apparently begun calling Michael this a few minutes prior–goodness knows why.)  ”You just told me I’ll fall into a coma if I fall asleep!  And you’re going to adandon me?”

Right then, one of my worst Thailand nightmares occurred.  Before moving here, our fears had included things like a motorbike accident, emergency surgery, and the presence of a large Tokay gecko in our bedroom.  Well, check, check, and…check.

Dazed and confused though I was, I remember the following very clearly. Behind Michael’s head, I saw a giant Tokay gecko making its way down the wall towards our pillows.  There was only a few inches and some mosquito netting–which had already failed at its one job that night–separating Michael’s head and a 12-inch lizard famous for biting and not letting go until you drowned it.  Michael turned around just in time to see its long tail disappear behind our headboard.

My sense of violation was overwhelming.  I hadn’t seen a Tokay that close up, had never seen one move that fast, and had never seen one in my house, nevermind my bedroom.  Even worse, Michael chose that moment to pass out from fear (or perhaps nighttime medication). The last thing he said to me before falling asleep was, “I’m so sorry, honey.  Try to stay awake for another three hours, okay?  I’m so sorry…”

In an effort to keep myself awake, I called my parents, who were in the middle of their long drive from Tennessee to Nebraska.  I didn’t have the courage to tell them about my head injury, so I blamed my weird emotional state on the fear of the Tokay instead.  Though my dad did say, “Honey, I can’t understand you when you slur all of your sentences together.  Are you okay?”  Unsure if it would be worse to tell my parents about the head injury or falsely claim to my father that I was intoxicated, I mumbled something about the spotty phone connection.

The next morning, Michael was more than happy to share about my laughter, my crying, and that I had declared his new name to be “Ship Captain Redlegs.”  I didn’t believe him, and wasn’t really listening–I was too busy reaching for the Advil and wondering why I had such a headache.