How To Fall In The Shower And Almost Die

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I fell in the shower on Monday evening.

It happened so quickly. One second, I was thinking about what variation of minimal-effort meal I was going to eat before my night shift and calmly squeezing the water out of my hair. The next second, I had the cold, shower tiles of death against my bare ass cheeks. One of the more disconcerting surfaces to be sat on.

Just that morning, I’d dreamt that I’d fallen ass-first into a public toilet and contracted some species of ass-eating parasite. It had been a traumatizing experience. Now I was living a minor alteration of that dream. What did it all mean?

I didn’t crack my head open. There was no grey matter sprayed across my shower floor. But I had managed to crack the shower screen in about seven different places. The grout had come flying off where the shower screen had nearly come off its hinges. There was debris scattered everywhere. It was an impressive sight.

I think Tina Fey has a part in 30 Rock about choking alone in her apartment as a single woman and no one finding her for days. I spent the next few moments consoling myself that someone finding me naked with shower debris everywhere and my head cracked open in as many places as the shower screen would be worse than that. At least I had avoided that fate.

I toweled off and pondered my existence.

It would have probably been one of my housemates who would have found me naked, wet and dead on the shower floor. Unless it was an intruder/robber/rapist/murderer who coincidentally broke into our house on the very day I slipped and died in the shower. What would be worse?

If it had been one of my housemates, I suppose there would be something unnerving about seeing a friend in this combination of naked undress and rigor mortis. Additionally, it has been a while since my pits have seen the blades of a razor. There could be some added embarrassment in that.

I was understandably perturbed after my shower incident. Not only did I feel like an 80-year-old woman in need of an occupational therapist but now I had to deal with fixing this hot and shattered mess. How much was it going to cost to fix?

I called the property manager the next morning.

“So. I slipped in the shower,” I said.

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” said the property manager.

“The shower screen is cracked.”

“That’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”

I was glad that the property manager seemed to grasp the gravity of the situation.

“Send me some pictures of the shower and we will send someone over to assess the damage,” she said.

I drove home and took 17 pictures from different angles. Perhaps too many angles. But the wrong had to be righted.

“I’m sorry to hear about the shower screen crack,” the landlord texted us the next morning. Word had evidently gotten around. I wondered if this would affect my attractiveness as a rental applicant in future. Fall risk. May destroy your shower. Nonetheless, I appreciated the condolences being offered to me.

I haven’t had many near-death experiences. There was the time I was on the back of a golf cart and forgot to hold on. The time I got a needlestick injury from a patient and thought I had HIV for three months. And the time I nearly slipped off an icy cliff in Nepal. But this, I suspect, takes the cake.

If I do actually meet the end of my life in another shower incident, I want it to be absolute carnage. Brains everywhere, cheekbone sticking out of on eyeball and three or more bloody teeth strewn across the floor. If I die in the shower, at least make it a good one.