WHAM! BLAM! KA-BLAM!

Sometimes life knocks you off your feet with a three punch combination which I like to refer to as the WHAM! BLAM! KA-BLAM!


I was expecting the Wham! For the last month I have been anticipating last weekend to be a rough one. The reason for this is that it was time for the quarterly assessment meeting at work and I knew that apart from being a very long working Saturday, it would be another round of the much anticipated showdown between bear and squirrel. The squirrel had been in training and though he was expecting to be bruised, felt confident he knew the technique to bring the bear down. As it turned out, the WHAM! was no more than a pin-prick. The bear failed to show up and the squirrel won by default. Although it did not carry as much satisfaction to have won that way, nevertheless the squirrel felt good about the rest of the weekend sans bruises to nurse.


So the meeting ended at about 6pm and I was in a happy mood. I called home and offered to get some takeaway from the neighbourhood shops. Food is so easy to come by in Malaysia that I thought nothing of going to three separate but closely placed shops to buy three different takeaways to satisfy the diverse food cravings at home.

I got to the shops which were all in the same block. I placed my first order, waited and collected it. Elapsed time was just 2 minutes. I proceeded to the next shop and it began to rain lightly. I was not worried as I had my umbrella and my car was not more than 30 meters away. I got my second takeaway. Elapsed time was about 6 minutes.

It was now raining very heavily.....I mean very,very heavily. Still with only one more order to make, I was not worried. I placed my order and it took just about 5 minutes for the dish to be cooked but in that time, the rain had been pelting down and I could see the water in the drains begin to swell up. I paid for the takeaway and was ready to make a dash for my car when......BLAM!

The shopkeeper did not have change for my payment. He had to nip over to another shop to get the change. He was not gone for more than 5 minutes but in that short delay, the drains overflowed and flooded the road with about two feet of dirty, smelly water. There was nothing else to do but when he came back with the change, I held all by purchases tightly, opened out my umbrella and stoically walked the 30 meters in 2 feet of smelly flood waters. When I got into my car, I thought that at least the day could not get worse. That was until "Ka-Blam!".


I got home, took a quick shower, changed and dried myself and then had dinner with my family. However, before the end of the dinner, I felt a sickly itch all over my legs. I knew this was due to the extremely dirty flood water that I had waded through. I went back under the shower and liberally soaped my legs and feet. It was because of the heavy lathering that I somehow felt my feet slip from under me as my whole body flipped to a horizontal position and I fell heavily on the bathroom floor.

KA-BLAM! I landed heavily on my buttocks and the base of my spinal column. I also hit my head and neck against the bathroom wall. I was truly winded and rolled about initially unsure of what was happening. The pain was intense and I was in shock. I was immediately afraid that I done some major injury on myself. It was a couple of days of bed rest before I was sufficiently recovered to walk properly again.

So, to re-cap, I was expecting WHAM! but that turned out to be a bit of a damp rag, a non-event. I underestimated BLAM! and was completely taken unawares by KA-BLAM! and I was out for the count. Friends, this is why I had no post up over the weekend and how I came about to be nursing some tender bruisers after all.