It’s been a while since I just told a story. The idea for this one has been sitting in my drafts folder for quite a while. I am going to tell you how I got all my scars and broken bones. Exciting stuff, huh? I know!

Let me give you the tally before we do a deep dive into each one. I have four scars and three broken bones. Actually, that’s not quite true. The last incident involved multiple broken bones, so it’s really six. I’d like to say I got these scars and broken bones while heroically serving in the military, but I can’t. Everyone of the scars and broken bones, except for the last incident, happened when I was a kid. The other one just happened last year. OK, lets get to it:

Right Wrist Scar

The first scar I don’t even remember getting. I can see it there on the top of my right wrist, but I was told the story by my parents. Apparently, when I was just a toddler, I was playing ball with my cousin in my grandparent’s house. They had one of those floor to ceiling glass windows. My cousin (it’s all her fault) threw the ball on a trajectory that required me to run to try and get it. I missed. I didn’t miss the window that I ran through. One of the pieces of the window sliced me right across the wrist, requiring me to get stiches and resulted in a three inch scar. The rest of these I remember all too well.

Chin Scar

No picture for this one. It’s buried in that mess of a Santa Beard I got going on right now. This one happened the very first night of the very first time I went to summer camp. I was probably around nine years old when our Church started a summer camp. I was so excited to be going! There would be games, and sports, and nature, but most of all there was a pool! Two straight weeks of getting pool time every day! The first day was magical with all the above activities. That night, when I went to bed in my group’s cabin, I dreamt of many pool days to come. It was not to be. My sleeping space happened to be the top loft on a set of bunk beds. Why do kids love to get on the top bunk? As an adult, the only thing I want to get on top of… err, never mind. Anyway, this was the 70’s and you know what that decade’s slogan on safety was? Safety Schmafety! The top bunk did not have any safety rails or anything of that nature that would impede a restless sleeper from going over the side. I didn’t know I was a restless sleeper until that night. Around three in the morning, I was rudely jarred awake by what felt like an uppercut boxing punch to the chin. When I managed to clear my head, I noticed I was sleeping on the hard concrete floor. Somehow, I had managed to bring my pillow on the trip down with me and I was resting my head on it just like I had planned on sleeping on the floor. However, when I tried to lift my head I noticed my chin was stuck to the pillow and there was this red stuff soaking the material, namely my blood. Believe it or not, not a single person in that cabin woke up when I fell. Not even my bottom bunkmate, Brad Jackson (I got him back years later at another summer camp by putting a frog in his sleeping bag). I got up with pillow still stuck to my chin and woke our group counselor who was just a teenager from our church. He ripped the pillow off my chin, gave me a paper towel, and told me to go back to sleep, so I did. The next morning, I had to rip that off my chin too and it was still bleeding. My mom had volunteered to help prepare meals for the camp so she had shown up to do breakfast when she saw me and my chin vagina. She went into full Beverly Goldberg mode! She bitched out the counselor and whisked me right off to the doctor where I got some more stiches and the orders to not get it wet. Know how hard it was to not get it wet in a pool? Hard. So hard in fact that I wasn’t even allowed inside the pool fence line for the rest of the two weeks! I said some not so Church campy things when I saw all the other kids enjoying the pool. FU Brad!

Right Knee Scar

A few years after the Church Camp incident I was hanging out in the woods where all the local neighborhood kids played. This time I was by myself and I was just fart knocking around. My friends and I had been working on building a fort there but we would only work on it for a bit before something else would catch our attention and we’d abandon the fort for a while. I had decided I would try and restart the project by gathering tree branches to use as walls. When I picked up one particular branch I got a surprise. There was a snake under it! I don’t know what kind of snake it was because I didn’t hang around long enough to find out. I dropped the branch and high tailed it out of there. In my haste, I tripped over a root and fell right on a small tree stub that was sticking out of the ground. It was from one of the trees we had chopped down earlier to build the fort. I felt a pain in my right knee but I immediately bounced back up and kept running, fearing the ferocious snake was pursuing me and right on my heels. When I exited the woods, I risked a glance back and saw there wasn’t an Anaconda lurking in the shadows, so I slowed my pace and decided to go home. I’d had enough of the outdoors for the day. As I walked back down my street and neared my house, Christy Latham, a girl my age who I went to school with and happened to live across the street from me, screamed and pointed at my knee. This was summer, so I was wearing shorts. I looked down to see a red bloody mess on my right knee. I also saw something white in that mess. Yup! The laceration ran so deep that I could see my freaking knee cap! I’m not usually a squeamish guy, but that one made my legs turn to rubber, and as I wobbled into the house, my mom took me on another run to the doctor where more stiches were put in and I got a six inch scar to show off.

Head Scar

This one involved another ball and another cousin. No picture for this one either since the scar is located in one of the little tufts of hair I have left on my head. I believe I was around 15 or so and we were at Church. We were waiting for services to begin and my cousin and I were down in the basement bouncing a ball to each other among all the old stuff that was stored down there. One of them was an old preacher’s podium that had very sharp corners. I found out just how sharp they were when I ran, hunched over, to try and scoop up the ball that had bounced out of my grasp. SMACK! I ran head first into the corner of that podium. I saw stars for a minute but then there was an announcement that services were starting and if I was late for that I would get my hide tanned. Did I ever mention that my dad was a part time preacher? Ever heard that saying Preacher’s kids are the worst? Yeah, that’s fodder for many another story. In this case my dad was up preaching in front of the congregation and my cousin and I managed to get to our seats just in time. As my dad got about five minutes in to his sermon, a lady a few seats down from me pointed at my head. I ran my hand through my hair, winced at the pain, and came back with a bloody hand. At this point, the lady whispered to my mom who was sitting just on the other side of her. She took one look at my soaked bloody head of hair and I was once again whisked to the doctor for more stiches. They had to shave part of my head to put in the stiches. It was quite the fashion statement, a half reverse mohawk. Surprisingly enough, it didn’t catch on.

Left Wrist

That’s it for the scars. Now, for the broken bones. I was somewhere in my upper single digit years old when I was playing with another ball. This time it was a Nerf football and I was at the Church parsonage for the preacher (not my dad at the time) and I was throwing the football around with his son. Man, I sure did get injured at Church a lot. Maybe that’s the reason I don’t go anymore. Anyway, the ball ended up on the roof of the detached garage and I climbed a tree next to it to get the ball back. The ascending operation went fine. The descending operation, did not. Oh, I descended all right, just not in the manner I had intended. When I went to take the small hop back to the tree limb that I had climbed up to before, it snapped and down I went where I landed on the ground sitting on my own left wrist! That’s right, my butt broke my wrist. Interestingly enough, another butt broke my right wrist, but we’ll get to that. So my doctor got to try his hand at something other than stitching me up for a change. I got the old school plaster cast where they wrap the wet pieces of whatever it is around you until it dries to the consistency of a rock. I got all the signatures on it and I used it as a club to whack my sister a couple of times. Can’t go swimming with one of those things on either, but luckily, it was in the fall and not swimming weather. Also, interestingly enougher (not a word, don’t care), swimming figures prominently in the breakage of my right wrist. Man, that sure is a lot of foreshadowing in one paragraph.

Right Wrist

OK, swimming and butts, let’s get to it. I was 17 for this one and I had been saving my money to go with all my friends to opening day of a water park called Crystal Lake. Yeah, same name as the camp in Friday the 13th, but Jason didn’t break my wrist. My friend, Stacie, did. More accurately, it was her butt that broke it, but it wasn’t her fault. I’m getting ahead of myself. This water park is on an actual lake and it was not some colossal park like you see in the big cities. It had a tall water slide on a man made hill that wound its way down and deposited you in the lake. There were a few swimming platforms off the beach in the lake proper, with a snack bar on the shore. There was also a what we now call a zip line, but I don’t remember it being called that back then. There were no harnesses or nylon belts strapping you into anything. It was just a T-handle on a wheel that ran along a cable that was angled down to the lake from a 20 foot platform. The last person to use the thing would pull it back via a rope attached to it and the next person would grab the handles and take off, letting go anywhere along the trip to plunge to the depths below. At the end of the cable were a group of rubber tires that caught the wheel. The most brave kids would hold on until they hit the tires and then go careening off in all directions while flipping head over heels until they landed in the lake. You would think this might be where I broke my right wrist. I didn’t, even though I probably should have as I was one of those kids that tempted fate by slamming into the tires. No, my bone breakage came at the top of the water slide. I was standing with a group of my friends in line. There were two tunnels there that would take you on different paths down the slide and a shallow pool of water with a concrete divider for the different paths. Someone got it in their head that it would be fun to push other friends down in the pool, so we all started doing it because we were dumb kids. I got pushed down and fell with my right arm across the divider. Another guy, who wasn’t really part of our friend group but who had come because someone knew him from Church (knew I’d work that in there), pushed Stacie and she fell with her butt right on my arm that was draped across the divider, that promptly divided my wrist bone. It hurt, and I knew something wasn’t right, but hear me out. This happened in the first half hour of our arrival to the water park that I had been saving up money for for several months. No way was I leaving early! Since this was a natural lake and it was the opening day in Spring, the water was still pretty cold, so it actually acted as a numbing agent that made it tolerable for me to stay. And stay I did, for another six hours. However, as I was driving home with my friend Robert next to me in the passenger seat, the warmth of the car wore that numbness off and I had a hard time keeping my right hand affixed to the steering wheel since my wrist kept wobbling around. I had to pull over and let Robert drive. He drove me right to the hospital where they X-rayed my wrist, confirmed the fracture, and I got the matching set cast I’d been waiting on for several years. On a side note, I didn’t live in a big town. The hospital only had one X-ray technician that had already gone home for the night. That X-Ray technician happened to be the girlfriend of another older friend of mine named Sam. When they called her in they had been in bed doing the nasty. The next time I saw him, Sam threatened to give me more fractures for cock bone blocking him.

Broken Ribs

This last one happened just last June when I went on a week long backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail. As you can see from the link, I actually wrote about it on this blog. I fell coming down some rocks and came down hard on my right side. I speculated at the time that I might have bruised or cracked a rib. I actually did crack a rib as kid (shocker I know, but since it wasn’t broken I didn’t include it in the list) and knew there was nothing that could be done about it. So I bore the pain, and it was a good three weeks to a month before it got better. Fast forward to October when I was getting a full body scan because of my liver problems. One of the techs asked me if I had fell on my right side recently. At first I said no, because I forgot about it, but then I remembered and told them I had fallen on a hike. They did some extra scans and when it was over I asked if they saw broken ribs. Only a radiologist doctor was allowed to make determinations from reading the scan but I could tell she knew something. She informed me she wasn’t allowed to give me results but if her elbow were to “accidently” bump the monitor screen and swing it in my direction, there was nothing she could do about assumptions I made from what I saw on it. Wouldn’t you know, she did bump the monitor in my direction and there I plainly saw four broken ribs that had healed up. It wouldn’t have made a difference if I had went to the doctor when it happened. They can’t do anything about broken ribs either but to let them heal on their own. Although when I told my wife I was too sore to do something that confirmation might have been nice supporting evidence for my argument.

Well, if you read this whole thing, that’s time you’ll never get back.

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