18 Days In

Eighteen whole days into this little experiment, and I must admit it was a little harder than I first anticipated as you can see from some of my posts recently. But A Blog a Day for 30 Days is what I said, and that is what you are going to get, even if it ends up just being something really random and stupid. I think today, I am going to write one of the topics from my recent Writer’s Block post, if only because I don’t really feel like thinking all that hard and they are kind of started a bit with my little short answers. I think I’ll just start at the top for now and begin with…

The Story of My Most Serious Injury

Luckily for me, I have made it through my 28 and a half years relatively unscathed on the injury front. This surprises me a bit because I am known to be very clumsy at times, and you would think with that awkward teen growth spurt I had that I would have fallen down a little bit more or something.

If I had to really think about it and pick a major injury that I remember, it is, in all retrospect, a very minor injury and one that is shared by my Pops. I still have the scar to prove that it happened, though I do not remember exactly when it happened, only that I was in elementary school at the time, and it involved a trip to the doctor, but not the emergency room.

It all stems from my mother’s affinity for buying stuff. Her thing now is movies. She is even worse than me. I but a lot of movies, probably more than I should. But my mother buys WAAAAAAAY more, and numerous copies of individual titles at that. Anyway, back in the day, my mother purchased a couple Ronco Food Dehydrators. Anyone that grew up around the time that I did remembers these things. You cut up fruit and dry it! You make fruit roll-ups for a fraction of the cost! You make your own jerky! And so on.

As part of the special promotion for buying within the next XX minutes, she also received something called the Dialamatic Food Slicer. It was a blade with a flat thing on it and a holder, and you used it to cut stuff up, most likely so that it could be placed on your Food Dehydrator and saved for the next nuclear event. Little old me…I decided I wanted to cut an apple up for some reason, I’m assuming to eat it and I was too lazy to just bite it and chew; I needed perfectly cut pieces of apples to enjoy or else the apple would not be nearly as wonderful or something.

Sure, I probably should have put the apple in the finger guard thing. But I was a big boy and I didn’t really need it. I was holding onto the apple, slicing away, making these perfect apple slices, really proud of myself, when the apple got a little to small and my fingers (two of them!) were cut by the blade, the tip of my right index finger and a smaller piece of my right middle finger. Nothing too major, but boy did it bleed. I went to the bathroom and grabbed a wash cloth and just tried to stop the bleeding enough to put a band-aid on it. It would not stop bleeding. It was not clotting. If I removed direct pressure from my finger, it would erupt like a volcano. Not very fun.

But could I tell my mother? Of course not. When she, or my dad, finally came to see what was going on, after I was in the bathroom for quite some time, they asked why I hadn’t used the little guard thing. Pops showed me his battle would from the Dialamatic Finger Slicer from a few days prior, so that is the injury that we share. We got in the car, didn’t even put shoes on, and drove to the after hours clinic to get it looked at. Mom asked for stitches, doctor said I didn’t need any, and they just wrapped it up and sent me home. One reason I remember it was in elementary school was because my mom came into my class the next day and told the teacher I might have a hard time writing for a few days because of my “accident” and the rather large wrap on my right index finger.

So that was probably my worst injury. I have never broken any bones or had major surgery, so I guess this will have to do. I sprained my wrist because I fell ice skating one time, and I got hit in the face with a softball too. Other than that…

P.S. Couldn’t run outside because of the stupid rain, but I did manage a mile and a half on the treadmill and another 30 minutes or so on the bike. Weighed myself and the scale reflected what I think is my actual current weight: 294. I knew the scale at the gym had to be off.