I don’t want to play ball anymore.

Remember what I said last week about how life keeps throwing curve balls at us? Well, this week it decided to switch things up and lob a hard fastball straight at my noggin.

On Saturday morning I was carrying groceries into the house when I slipped on a patch of ice on the driveway. Both my feet flew out from under me, and I was suspended in the air just long enough to wonder what in the mother-of-all-curse-words was happening before the concrete slammed really hard into my body. Or vice versa. My head was one of the hardest things hit, along with my left elbow and the right side of my hinder.

For a while all I could do was lie there, surrounded by my spilt groceries. I think I might have been crying in pain. Or wailing. I remember hearing my husband swear, and then my neighbor across the street calling over to ask if I was okay, and then Matt almost slipped when he got to me, but thankfully he recovered his balance before he landed on top of me. And then the neighbor came over, and I felt like I needed to be brave and put on a show of being tough and not alarm anybody, so I made myself get up — slowly, carefully, making sure nothing was broken which, thank God, was the case — and brushed myself off while Matt and the neighbor picked up the groceries. I made a joke about how it was a good thing I landed on the part of my rear with all the padding and avoided cracking my tail bone, took the grocery bags from my neighbor, thanked her and declined her offer to help carry them in, and proceeded to do so myself, insisting that I was just a little bruised, but I’d live.

After we got the groceries put away, we still had another errand to run, and I insisted that I was okay to go, even though I hurt like hell, so we went. It was on the way to the next store that I noticed my vision had gone all fuzzy and I didn’t seem to be thinking quite clearly. It was in the store that Matt noticed I was slurring my speech and acting like I’d had a few drinks. So we wrapped things up and went home, where I consulted Dr. Internet and figured out that I had a concussion.

Needless to say, this has all thrown my week off-kilter. I’ve spent the last few days resting, getting as much sleep as I could. I think Monday was the worst of it; not only did I feel like I’d been hit by a truck, hurting in places I didn’t even know could hurt, but I apparently had some kind of post-concussion syndrome that made me all sad and weepy and lethargic and useless.

Tuesday, though, I finally started to feel back to normal. I’m still sore, but it’s tolerable, and my head feels like it’s screwed back on straight. So I’ll be spending the rest of this week trying to make up for lost time and catch up on my article quota.

I know I have some things to be thankful for in all of this. I’m thankful that it wasn’t much, much worse. That nothing was broken, and I wasn’t seriously or permanently injured. I’m thankful Matt didn’t end up falling and getting hurt, too. And I’m thankful that we had just bought a brand new bottle of pain medication, which I needed a lot of over the last few days.

But I would really just like for Life to stop trying to play ball with us for a while, because we’re really bad at it, and we really just need a chance to catch our breath, please, ‘kay thanks.