During the weekends, when I was in town, I liked to head to the bar on Saturday night, and then later in the night, I would head to one of our clubs to go dancing. As I and my buddy Kerry were walking into the nightclub that night, I saw the bouncer was straddled on top of a girl and actively punching her in the face; she was a bloody mess and not moving. One look in his eyes showed he was not about to stop.
When you walk into the club, you first come into a small room where you pay the cover cost and get your stamp from a girl in a ticket window. You would then walk through another door into the club. This was a small room, and the bouncer was a big fella. I was fairly inebriated and did not properly take into consideration the situation. Instead, I took 2 steps toward him and, with all my might, I kicked him in the side of his head with the heel of my cowboy boot, hoping to put him down. This should have rendered him unconscious, but to my horror, this seemed to do nothing more than piss him off.
He turned toward me and knocked me out with one punch from his giant hand. I saw it coming up, but could not dodge it. That hand looked like a sledgehammer, but it felt more like a baseball bat when it hit me. My friend who was there says he then got off the girl, grabbed me by the hair and dragged me outside, where he proceeded to smash my head on a cement abutment. Everyone was screaming, but he just kept slamming my head against the cement. After a bit, he left me there and went back to work in the club. I was covered in blood, my lips were mushy, my nose was broken, my teeth were a mess, my eyes were black, and I was dead. You hear tales of people who died, and they have all sorts of fantastic experiences, but I had nothing; I just lay there dead and unaware of anything.
Someone called the police, and they arrived along with an ambulance. The bouncer was arrested by the cops, and he did not go friendly from what I heard. The ambulance attendants dealt with the girl and me. The girl was in bad shape and would need numerous surgeries to put her face back together. She was air-lifted to Vancouver, and I lay on the pavement deceased. Two attendants worked on me until they pulled me back. Apparently, it took some time to get me breathing again. I know this because one of the attendants came to see me the next day in the hospital to tell me the story. I thanked him for saving my ass.
Once the ambulance got me to the hospital, they stitched up my face as best they could and then put me into a room for observation. I was made to wait for pain medication, and I was not allowed to fall asleep because of the damage my head had sustained. They had a nurse sit beside me throughout the night whose only job was to keep me awake; she was an old schoolmate whom I had thought of as nice when we were young. After shaking me for most of the night, I was not very happy with her. I got over it, though. She was only doing her job. Got pain meds by morning and a chance to sleep.
I heard the girl received numerous facial reconstruction surgeries and was hospitalized for some time. She fully recovered in the end. I never met her. I think I would have liked to see her once and chat a bit about that night, but I never had the opportunity.
My injuries were messy but pretty minor. When I got out of the hospital, the inside of my mouth had over 100 stitches holding it together, and my face was covered in bruises. My broken nose would take a while to heal. I was off work for a few weeks. My face was sore for quite some time, and months, any bump to the nose would bring on a nosebleed that would always take time to stop.