This evening, I endured my (so far) worst physical injury ever.

Mel left in the morning for Queensland, a holiday-slash-move of indeterminate length which she's planned for a while. Wednesday is my day off work ever since the maths PhD commenced, so I went into uni, showed what work I'd done to my supervisor, and then headed back home with Dana, whom I'd bumped in the courtyard near the maths building. We share not only an aptitude for maths but for heavy drinking, this latter being the one we soon decided to hone. Next thing you know, it was six hours later and we'd been joined in my loungeroom by a handful of similarly skilled chemical practitioners, and things were flowing along nicely. Christ knows how many cones I smoked along with the beer (both cunningly ingested on an almost-empty stomach), but soon enough I felt like I was greening out and retired to bed for a mid-party powernap.

Half an hour or so later, I got up and started preparing an adhoc meal amongst the crowd in the kitchen. Standing up took its toll, however, and feeling quite woozy I headed back to bed for recovery attempt two. I didn't make it.

Next thing I know, I awake on the loungeroom floor. For some reason, I was unsurprised to be "napping" in this location. Fucking hell, though, there was some definite oral discomfort. In fact, are those chips of tooth floating around in there? Damn, I must have been grinding my teeth like a motherfucker. No point moving, though, it's comfy down here.

I'm told that at some point during my unconsciousness, Gid found me face down, and in his crazymofo way requested to be allowed to walk on my back. Who was I to argue? Who was I to move any part of my body at all, come to think of it? So apparently he trod on my back, then I rolled over and he saw my face and was filled with horror. Inexplicably, though, he soon brushed the sight from his mind, and with the explanation "You scared me for a second!", left the room. Shaun, who was sitting near me as I "napped" and listening to The White Album, noticed the fear briefly cross Gid's face and then pass, from which he presumed I'd pulled a scary face (or something) and that nothing was wrong.

A minute later, though, I roll over again and Shaun freaks out and all of a sudden I'm wider awake as I become the centre of attention and everyone is demanding "what the HELL did you do?" and I'm like, I dunno, what, why, what's wrong?, until the blood all over my chin surprises me and my teeth feel like a shattered wreck and Shaun demands to be allowed to look in my mouth, this request granted on my insistence that he not freak out... so he braces himself and peers into the mess that was my expensive orthodontistry and says "Dude... it's not good".

Anyway, no-one saw shit and I don't remember shit, so I end up guessing that I lost consciousness near the bedroom door and bust my chin open and shattered my teeth as my head hit the floor or the wall or some furniture or something, in any case, far less comfortable than the pillow I'd been headed for. (Later I learn that I'd likely been developing pneumonia--the deserved result of inhaling carcinogens on top of a lingering cold--and fainted due to this, plus pot, plus beer, plus no food. What a dickhead.)

Soon enough, Renee and Matt come with me to the emergency room at John Hunter Hospital in Kristy's car and I'm taken in and stitched up (the worst bit, of course, is administration of the local anaesthetic) and X-rayed and told that my jaw's broken, more on which (if I get around to it) in another daylog. And the first of many shitty nights unfolds as I sleep (yeah, right) in the emergency ward and listen to the dickheads passing through around me. (One, in particular, sticks in my memory. An 18yr-old with an attitude huger than he thinks his balls are called Andrew, who obviously got his head split open in a fight but who manufactures a ridiculous story about jumping into rocky water instead, all delivered in his arrogant fuckyou tone, boasts that he "wasn't KOed" this time like he was the other night and generally makes a pain of himself. Including refusal to hold still while he's being stitched, and loud complaints about said procedure betraying that his manliness isn't quite as huge as he acts it is. All this, mixed in with his tearful bonding with an equally repugnant dickhead whose wife is in the bed near mine, and who belligerently questions the (female, foreign) doctor attending her before saying, in her full earshot, "she doesn't know what she's on about" and choosing Andrew (birds of a feather) as his preferred conversational partner rather than staying to hear the prognosis.)

Am writing this after the whole ordeal's progressed somewhat... so more to come.