More Burn Notice Thoughts

Watching Burn Notice with a concussion provides an odd framework. Nearly every episode, our heroes and heroines blow something up, and we watch them leap--or get blown away--from the blast.

Nobody, however, gets a concussion, or if they do, they don't complain about it for more than a minute.

Your brain is soft, squishy stuff that floats inside the hard bone of your skull. When you are moving, brain and skull move along together. When you stop suddenly, skull stops, but brain keeps moving. This shears away connections at the base of the skull, but it gets worse. Brain hits side of skull, is knocked backwards, hits other side of skull, and winds up bruised all around. It's kind of like what happens to a house in an earthquake. Earth moves, house starts moving. Earth stops, starts going the other way, but house keeps moving in the first direction and either the walls flex like crazy and things fall down inside, or the house simply falls off foundation and everything goes boom.

I can speak about concussion now from experience, and I didn't even get blown up. I was ice-skating on a public rink where kids were breaking the rules and racing. (I had just told them to stop.) A tall teenager, going full speed, lost his balance and slide full speed into the back of my skates. I went up, then down, flat on my back. The helmet could protect some of the back of my head, but still, brain sheared, went front, went back, went up went down, while neck muscles got some pretty bad whiplash, ribs were bruised, elbow black and blue, etc. So, I know, really know, how dangerous being blown off your feet can be.

Of course, your brain isn't the only thing that would get messed up in an explosion. Hearing would be destroyed. Each time. 

But Mike, or Fiona, or Sam, or Jesse, all get up, and run or walk to someone important, who usually says something softly to them--some of the actors in particular have adopted that recent: "if I whisper my lines, I will sound more intense," school of acting. And our recently blown off their feet hero can hear them.

And we're not even talking about the times people slug someone in the head.

My little ones and I have enjoyed watching another show, Chuck, which has a lot of this stuff, too, but my husband doesn't like Chuck, preferring Burn Notice. "Chuck is a fairy tale," says my husband. Huh. Don't get me started.