Curling is a contact sport?

We've been curling every Wednesday night for the past 4 or 5 weeks...it's kind of our date night. This week, there weren't very many people there so we curled in teams of three people instead of four. For those of you who have never curled, let us explain why this small fact is important. When there are four people curling, one is the "skip" (basically the captain of the team) who shows you where to aim your "rock" (the large granite stone) and decides the team strategy. One player throws the rock, one is skipping, and then the other two players "sweep" the rock if needed with the broom to either help it go faster or to make it go straighter down the ice.

Now, when you only have three players, that leaves only one person to sweep. Sweeping is actually the most strenuous part of curling, it takes quite a bit of work. So, sometimes the person who is throwing the rock might need to move quickly after throwing it to help sweep their own rock. This is what happened on Travis' first rock of the second end this week. Melissa was skipping (because she doesn't sweep all that well), and a girl named Courtney was sweeping. Travis threw the rock and felt like he didn't throw it hard enough so he decided to run up to help Courtney sweep. This was probably not the best idea he has ever had. Running on ice is not exactly safe...a lesson that we thought Travis learned five years ago when he got a concussion running on the ice playing broomball. Wouldn't you know, a similar thing happened when he ran this time. His feet ended up in the air and his head ended up on the ice....and he didn't get up.

The short version of the story is that he cut his head open in two places and bled quite a bit on the ice (we are curious about how they are going to fix that up). There was an ER doc curling that night who came over and checked him out, saying that he needed to go get stitched up. The ambulance came and agreed and one of the other curlers drove us to the hospital. Travis got three stitches and four staples and we were out of there in less than two hours. The funniest part was that the doctor who stitched him up actually wants to go curling!