The fall leaves beamed through the window as I wafted the fresh turkey smell in the air. The cool fall breeze flowed through the cracked kitchen window where my mom was cooking. It was Thanksgiving day in the year 2015, me and my cousin from Chicago were waiting for dinner to be ready because we were sick of smelling food but not eating it. Hence we wandered over to the kitchen. “When will the food be ready, mom?” I asked.
“Dinner is almost ready,” she replied, “Just give us one more hour.” Our hearts were broken, and our stomachs were grumbling. So we tried to think of things we could do in the meantime. And as dumb kids we were (and are), we thought the most sufficient way to waste time was for us to chuck rocks at each other. This did not go to the unforeseen plan we had.
After just five minutes of throwing rocks at each other, my cousin Shyla had the great idea of throwing a perfectly aimed rock straight for my head while I was not looking. Phew! That was a close one, I said to myself. As I thought it had just skimmed my head and had not actually fully hit my head, I started to throw rocks back at my cousin; annoyance flowing through my body. But it was not until she screamed “AHHHHH!” that I realized how serious this had become. I knew from just her scream how bad this had gotten because she is the most calm person I know.
One great example of this is when I went to Chicago for summer break. It was so hot that I thought I was ice cream because I sweat so much and I thought that I was melting. Because of this we decided to go to the Dairy Queen as it was the closest ice cream place to her house. When we went there and started to eat our ice cream, we were looking out the window when both of us saw a kid steal another kid's ice cream. And when I looked over at my cousin to see her reaction I saw a calm and carefree look on her face. It looked as though she didn’t see what happened. When I asked her why she wasn’t shocked she said, “It happens”. That was it.
The next thing I know my mom is yelling at me in the car asking not very politely what happened as she was dabbing the blood off my head. At this point I had no idea what was going on except for that I was hurt and I needed to go to the E.R. immediately. Why did we have to throw rocks at each other? I wondered while all of this was happening.
When I got to the E.R. I was rushed to the procedure room, when I got there a nurse was waiting for me.
“Hi, buddy,” she kindly said, “unfortunately you have a big cut in your head so we have to staple it together so it doesn’t get worse.”
“Oh,” I said as I completely ignored what she told me because I was so overwhelmed by what was happening around me. But while the nurse told me that I had to get staples she didn’t tell me that I had to do all of this without anesthesia.
When they got the tool they used to staple my head together I still had no idea what was going on, I guess it was the shock or maybe because I was very little and did not yet grasp the full feeling and meaning of pain, but I didn’t seem to really understand what was happening and why it was so important. But all of that would definitely change soon.
After the procedure I was absolutely flabbergasted by how much that hurt “owwww,” I whimpered. It was almost as if they ripped my bone open and then continuously stapled it with a stapler and then rammed a pumpkin into my head. Soon after that experience the nurse came back into the room, but this time it was with a treat. Without knowing it I had just eaten the most scrumptious sorbet ice cream known to man. It was so good I forgot about my injury. But it didn't stop me from regretting my actions: Ugh, I expressed to myself, that was probablyyy a bad decision. I have told myself this phrase many times. This is because I get hurt a lot; so much so that in my entire life span I most likely have gotten injured more than a retired army veteran.
One perfect memory of this is when I went to a ziplining park in Cancun. In the ziplining park there was one big zipline that I really wanted to go on. And after I finished everything else I was so excited to go on the big one. Once I got on the zipline I could not fathom how fast I was going and I had a huge grin on my face, but that would all change soon. After a few seconds it felt like I got electrocuted in my eye, I evidently started to panic and was swinging around on the zipline. I also most definitely broke every rule that they had told us before going on the zipline. But I was determined not to die by making myself fall off of it. So I somehow managed to pull myself together and stop swinging. Thankfully I made it out alive, but it felt like my eye fell out of my eye socket. I later found out that metal from the zipline fell into my eye.
This experience was not so much my fault but the unluckiness of the situation. But I can not say the same thing for cutting my skull open. Even though it was not fully my fault but also my cousin’s fault for chucking the rock at my head, I still take the blame for causing this to happen to me. After I went back home from the hospital I had realized what I chose to do was a bad idea, but my body kept hurting me for it. Every single time my head would ache viciously one thought would burst into my head, why did I have to do thattttt. Even after my head stopped hurting whenever I made a bad decision with anything I always say that same phrase. So even though breaking my head open was one of the worst experiences of my life, I still think one way or another these turn of events were a blessing in disguise.
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