Even a skull fracture can take days to kill you

But if someone hits their head hard enough on something hard, it can kill them instantly.

Or so I've heard.

edit for editiosity's sake....

But if someone hits their head hard enough on something hard, it'll kill them instantly.

Well, if you hit it just right. A math teacher from my high school died summer before my freshman year from a brain stem injury during a soccer game. Fluke tragedy.

The thing about falling off a horse that's not going very fast, in my experience, is that it's not a fast and violent thing. (It's also a lot less easy to do.) Even if the horse stumbles and you're not paying attention, it's generally a less dramatic stumble than if you were going faster than a walk. So, sure, there are probably deadly low-speed accidents, but in fiction, it's not something for which I could suspend my disbelief.

And it would probably take a lot to get a good cavalry horse to shy and run away.

Maybe it could be a remount? New, you know, inexperienced?

This is from way earlier this morning, but

Looks like there are a couple more Eyes eps to become available. I'll put the first four on a DVD, and mail out three copies to start trees. By the weekend.

Yay!

I forgot to set my alarm last night, and then got woken up twice by the cats, and the third time I woke up it was 9:17. Oops.

Well, I mean, if you are willing to have a bloody splat (or really good aim for the medulla), you can have a skull fracture that is quickly fatal. But it seemed like Susan was not interested in splatting.

For non-splat brain injuries, it's likely to take long enough for edema to kick in, which is like, what, 15 minutes?

I have another fucking migraine.

That does it.

If you're cutting stuff out of your diet to test its effects on migraines, how long do you have to go to make sure it's effective? A week? Two weeks? Month? Three months?

We clearly need a trauma doctor on the board to help with these little things. I think you can be killed instantly - or at least rendered unconscious instantly with death following quickly - by a well-placed blow to the temple. I freely admit that I learned this by reading Dorothy Sayers (specifically, both Murder Must Advertise and The five Red Herrings). Now, you just have to get someone to fall off a horse and hit himself on the head with an appropriate rock.

I gave in and turned on the heat. to a toasty 66 degrees.

cliffs are good things to fall off of t not helpful

Now, you just have to get someone to fall off a horse and hit himself on the head with an appropriate rock

I volunteer Dick Cheney.

I think if it happens twice in literature that somebody can recite off the top of their head, then it might be exactly the cliche that Susan is hoping to avoid. I don't know whether it's true or not -- there is no "required to live" brain function located at either temple; and it's still probably the edema that kills you -- but it sounds like the kind of thing that happens in novels.

Like how action heroes have artistic cuts through eyebrows, but never have, like, half a nostril sheared off or four broken fingernails and a broken cheekbone.