Numb Pressure on the Occipital Bone

Posted on May 23, 2005 in Adolescence Body Language

The back of your head — not the eyes or the nose or the mouth or the ears — is when you really feel your sense of where you and who you must be. I’m looking at the cover of an old copy of the Ultimate Visual Dictionary which features the face of a man partly stripped down — here to the muscles and the fat, there to the bones and the hidden veins and nerves on the face. On the tip of the nose, there’s that odd sponge we miss when we look at a skull. Without the muscles, the eye hangs off a pair of strips crossing the orbit. Nerves run up the side, but none it seems reach the top: this is why the brain is most unaware of wounds that fall closest to it.

I’ve been hit up there a few times, once with a hoe. I was 14 or 15 and in Boy Scouts doing a conservation project. We were chopping weeds. One of my crew partners saw a particular large one that he wanted to eradicate, but I was between him and the weed. What I remember is feeling a thickness coming down and the sides of my skull vibrating gray blue. The ring that passed through my ears was unearthly and like no other. I did not pass out. I did not feel nauseous. (For some reason, I have been resistant to concussion all my life.)

Afterwards, my father had words with the other kid’s father. My attacker tried, like everyone in that damned troop tried, to blame it on me. I felt bad for creating such a commotion. But our parents worked it out.

I don’t like mentioning this wound to the head or any other because cruel people tend to insinuate that I am brain damaged. To be honest, I don’t know. I have been slapped about and hit so often that it would not surprise me. But I don’t exhibit any odd tics other than the usual typos. Sometimes I worry that my intelligence has been compromised.

In this moment, I am wondering just that. In the back of my head — where I feel the soul must reside in the cerebellum — I feel a numbness. A jock strap pulled around the occipital bone. Is this holding me back or holding what sanity I have in? I cannot answer the question.

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A friend walked into a street sign while we were out walking together recently. It smacked her in the forehead. Even though the sign was raised high, she was tall. The next morning she woke with dizziness and a headache. When I heard the news of her concussion, I sank. She was laughing and crying over the accident. I could only feel badly for her.