How A Frying Pan Ruined My Life

If you've never been hit in the head with a frying pan, you have no idea how painful it is.

Sure, any metal object flying at your head at extremely high speed is going to hurt - but I'd say that a stainless-steel frying pan has got to be top five at least.

Allow me to explain. my name is Kaitlyn Lochbine. As for why I am extremely biased against stainless-steel cookware; it is because one caused me to go blind.

I don't quite know what happened - the details around that particular time tend to get a little fuzzy - other than that I got too close to an angry grandma with a frying pan.

You see, I work (or, worked) at the Manistee Nursing Home, and we'd recently gotten a new resident who was none-too happy about being put in an old folks home. Her name is Marge Hallower, and she has a mean throwing arm.

Her younger brother had moved her into our nursing home because she was to the point where she couldn't live on her own any more - a fact which she strongly (and violently) disagreed on.

She moved in on Monday, and by Friday; she was everyone's worst nightmare. In the span of four days, she had managed to:

Almost start a fire

Break three lamps

Bruise two workers

And pretty much isolate herself.

I probably should have remembered all this when I decided to go visit her. What can I say? I felt bad for the poor lady. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be in her ancient shoes; being yanked from your own cozy home into a new place where you knew nobody, and you couldn't do things your own way anymore. She'd probably had to leave so much stuff behind; years worth of antique coffee mugs, cases of decorative spoons... whatever it was old people enjoyed.

Plus, the owner of the place told me to.

When I arrived at her apartment, all I could hear was the sound of Gene Autry cranked up to level 100.

I knew she wouldn't be able to hear me over 'The Cowboy and the Indians', so I let myself in.

That was my first mistake.

As soon as I cracked the door open, I was greeted by a nauseating wave of vanilla-rose perfume. "Um, Ms. Hallower?" I managed to call between gags. I willed my eyes not to water.

I was about to call out again, when suddenly a cardigan-wearing shadow loomed in front of me. "...Ma'am?"

The cranky old lady in front of me shifted. "What do you want? If you came up here to try and talk me into going downstairs for dinner, it ain't gonna work!" she waved her arms when she talked, which sent more waves of perfume into the air. I gulped. That was exactly why I had come.

Let me tell you more about myself. I live in an apartment with my three cats (Boots, Molly, and Dash) only two blocks from the nursing home, so I can walk to work everyday. In all honesty, I only worked at the home cus it paid good. anyways, I'm 18, and I don't scare easily - but let me tell you; when I was standing there, looking up at 150 pounds of evil grandma, I was terrified.

"You don't have to stay for the entire time," I tried. "You could just go down for a few minutes. make some friends." I smiled.

That just made her madder. "I don't need any friends!" she growled. "What friends I had are either dead or still back home, where I should be."

I sighed - I could tell this wasn't going to be easy.

I tried in vain for the next nine minutes to get her to come downstairs for dinner (If you didn't already guess, I failed).

It was then that I made my second mistake. I tried to be friendly.

More accurately, I offered to help her make dinner in her own apartment. After a few minutes of me trying to convince her, she agreed begrudgingly. We decided on scrambled eggs because they were easy and fast (and because I make a mean egg). what happened next is what landed me in the hospital for three weeks. After instructing her to get out the salt and pepper, I bent down to grab the eggs from the fridge. I must have said something that upsetted her - because the next thing I knew, I turned around only to be cracked in the head by a flying nine-inch frying pan.

flash to the future; three days later I awoke in the hospital with a concussion and fractured skull, as well as eyes that didn't work.

Turns out that she didn't accept my friendly gesture out of kindness, she accepted so she could try to send me to the hospital - which worked. Apparently she thought that if she wounded me, the nursing home workers would decide that she couldn't stay there and send her home. Needless to say, that failed. Instead she got sent to and intense-care home in Grand Rapids.

Its been two years since the incident, and I still don't remember what I said to her - if anything - that drove her to yeet a pan at me. I often wonder how she is getting along, and how many fires she has started in her new home. As goes without saying, I quit my job as soon as possible, and now work from home. It took a while, but I learned how to function as a blind person. At first; there was a lot of waking up at 2:00 am and thinking it was morning, walking into trash cans, and tripping over sleeping cats (Boots, I said I was sorry!) but I got the hang of it. The doctors say I'm lucky to be alive - a hit hard enough to cause blindness could have broken my skull. I still crash into walls sometimes, but I've mostly got it figured out.

I guess you could say that the moral of this story is: Don't give old people frying pans.

Author's note: I apologize if anyone finds this... I don't know... offensive? this is not my usual writing style; I just wanted to try something different. please tell me what you think - don't hold back!

- Charis.