It was a rainy afternoon and I was trying to stop by the house and take some cold medicine before going to a Pickens City Council meeting. On my way up my driveway, I got stuck in some wet leaves that had fallen across the driveway.

I know this does not sound like a real problem, but trust me, when you live in Dacusville and your driveway is about a quarter of a mile long — uphill — it is.

So I got out of my car and walked the rest of the way up. When I got to our front porch, I pulled out my door keys and stepped onto the wooden porch in front of our kitchen door and got ready to unlock the door. I tripped and found myself laying on the porch enjoying the rain.

As I lay there, I found that I could not get up. Apparently I had fallen into the brick wall at the corner of the house. So I had no choice but to “enjoy the rain” until my parents arrived home from wherever they had been.

About an hour later, my parents came home. My father noticed me there and thought I was dead. He rushed from the car and tried to cover me with a tarp. But bless his heart, picking up a 300-plus-pound son was a bit to ask of him. He called the nearest ambulance station and asked them to help me.

They arrived in about 10 minutes. My mother pulled an old tarp over me to protect me from the rain that was still coming down. The ambulance workers helped me to my feet, and I went inside the house. After I had caught my breath, I got into the car with my parents and headed to the hospital to get my arm taken care of.

When we got there, the staff was very friendly. Nobody asked how it happened or made comments like, “Son, can’t you see a brick wall in front of you?”

They x-rayed the arm and found that I had broken a bone in my forearm. Because I had broken the same arm previously, they said they could not set the arm in a cast. Instead, they just put the arm in a sling and told me to do the best I could with it and hope it heals quick.

The next week, I went to see a doctor, and she was concerned about the cold I had caught by laying in the rain for an hour. She admitted me into the hospital to deal with the cold.

While I was in the hospital, they tested my body several ways. When after a week I was scheduled to get out, the doctor wanted to run one more test. In that test, they found that I had a blood clot in my lungs that was causing my problems.

The phrase scared me. “Blood clot in the lungs” sounds like pretty serious business. But the staff at the hospital began treating me, and before long the clot was gone. I guess I should be thankful for the doctor who insisted on “one more test.”

So I went home to recover. The clot, due to my medication, disappeared. I finally felt better again.

Honestly, I spent most of the time recovering from my cold, not from my arm injury. Once I rested a few days, my arm healed enough so I could type again, which meant I felt no ill effects from the break at all.

But had I not laid in the rain for more than an hour, I probably would not have known about the blood clot at all. Unless somebody had written about the clot on my tombstone.