Stitches and Scars

                First off, my brother and I have always been close. Even though we are seven years apart, he is still the person I relate to most out of anybody I know. We have always had the same interests and like doing the same things, most of them he had to tediously teach me. Even as close as we are, we were still siblings, and who doesn’t have occasional confrontations with their siblings. Most of our run-ins were just arguments between us that really didn’t have any effect on our relationship and we were better the next day or even in a few hours. Although this one day when one of our less extreme, more playful-like confrontations forced me to have my first ever real experience with an emergency room.

                I was about nine years old at the time and my brother was sixteen. My brother, Josh was in the kitchen most likely eating, and I walk in. Based on our past, I probably said some lame comment which caused my brother to retaliate with his own. This was just the way that we worked. Always making fun of each other in non-hurtful ways just to see how the other would react. You know, typical sibling speech where one sibling knows what makes the other tick and exploits that knowledge to their advantage. Nothing between Josh and I was ever meant to hurt one another, nothing was meant to be intentionally rude. This was how our conversations usually started, with one of us making a funny or poking comment to get the other person interested in what they had to say.

                After mild bickering for a minute or two, I must have grabbed something of Josh’s because I remember him jumping out of his seat and chasing me through the house. I saw Josh get up and I ran as fast as I could, out of the kitchen, and down the hall. I had no idea where I was going; I was just playing with my brother. I turned the corner into my sister’s room, not realizing how close Josh was behind me. I leapt onto my sister’s bottom bunk and tried to prep myself for Josh jumping on me while trying to get his object, most likely a spoon, back. I laid on the bed for a mere second then felt Josh slam into me like a car into a brick testing wall.

                I flew forward with my chin pressed into my chest trying to see my brother crash into me. Right then I felt an extremely sharp pain, more like a burning sensation, come from the back of my head. My vision went blurry and I became confused for a split second not yet realizing what happened.  I look up to see my sister’s dresser looming over me as my head lay at the corner of it. I then recognized the pain once again and realized that the back of my head had slammed into the edge of the dresser. I immediately got up, still dizzy and vision blurry, and immediately started crying because of shock.

                I ran to the bathroom soon followed by my older sister and Josh. I started to feel a warm, liquidy, feeling running down the back of my neck. Josh then flipped on the cold water and told me to dunk my head. As I sat there with cold water running over the back of my head, my brother and sister called my mom, who wasn’t home yet from errands. Being in the medical field, my mom knew quite a bit about head wounds and told my brother and sister to keep pressure on the gash and to check if my pupil were dilated. Josh and my sister then proceeded to check one eye each, which proved to be very ineffective in determining if dilation was occurring.

                Since there was nothing for us to do until my mom got home, my brother got an ice pack, wrapped it in a cloth, and sat me down to play on a Nintendo 64 for the hour that it took my mom to get home. During this time I was worried that I would bleed out while playing Automoblili Lamborghini. My mom finally got home and she was immediately bombarded by the apologies of my brother for hurting me. My mom had me keep the ice pack on my head and we got in the car, headed for the E.R.

                After about a thirty minute drive, we got there and the waiting room was extremely packed with people all waiting for a turn with the doctor. My mom went up to the desk, explained the situation, and the doctor immediately called me into his office. The doctor then asked a few questions of how it happened, how long it had been, and others I couldn’t make out. He then had me lay on a table, face down on a pillow, and told me I would be getting a shot of anesthesia and to brace myself. The pain wasn’t as unbearable as was actually hearing the shot go into the back of my head and dispense its liquid being in such close proximity to my ear.

                The doctor got out what I would imagine would be a sewing kit and started to stitch my wound close. The worst part was not the pain, but the gross symphony of sounds that I would hear in my left ear each time he dipped his needle into my skin. The stitches took about fifteen minutes total to complete. As he finished he told me to lift my head and sit up to see how the stitches held. I lifted my head to see an almost perfect circle of blood on the pillow. The doctor then told us a few things about the stitches, when to come back, and told us to call him if anything came up or we needed help. We left the hospital; I was still dizzy from the lack of blood in my head and knew that one visit would probably cost a lot of money.

                After this incident in my life, I realized how fragile humans actually are. Just one cut in the right place could have killed me given the time. Little things like this manage to take lives like mine every day and it just seems weird to me why such a little incident out of every possible thing to happen to me brought me closer to my grave than anything else. This accident didn’t really have a major impact in my life except for feeling like if I didn’t play my cards right, I would end up six feet under.