I like hearing stories about my family, especially stories from when they were young. Sometimes my family would be doing watching TV or playing a game of some sort and my dad would remember an injury that he had that related to what we were watching or playing. Every once in a while, he would tell us about how unlucky he was.
One story of him being unlucky is he chipped a tooth. He was playing a game in school and he was running towards a wall. Then he stumbled and ran into the wall. He also fell and hit his forehead on a cement block. He ended up cracking his skull. He said that he was so young when it happened that he can barely remember what went on. Another story is he was walking around in his dad’s shop and heard a weird noise. He went to the back to see what it was and the noise happened to be a wasp nest. One of the evil little wasps decided to sting him right between the eyes. He could not see for about a day because his eyes were swollen shut.
My dad also had to have two surgeries. One was on his left ear. He had to get some bone and a pollup removed from behind his left ear because he had a pollup growing through his ear drum. He said that it hurt for a while before he went to the doctor. The other surgery was on his right knee. He had a motorcycle accident and because of that he tore an ACL (anterior cruciate ligament), tore a miniscus disk, ruptured his patella ligaments (knee cap), and had torn cartilage. In other words, he totally blew his knee.
Another thing that happened was he fractured his left shin. He was trying to do a handspring in the gymnastics room for PE, and let’s just say that he didn’t really stick the landing. During one of my dad’s football games in junior high, he grabbed someone’s jersey while trying to tackle them, and he dislocated his right hand middle finger. He said that his coach grabbed his finger and just popped it right back into place, and then my dad went back in and finished his game.
Last but not least, our whole family was at our little home away from home at the Twin Lakes near Woonsocket. The porch door hit one of his toes on his right foot and dislocated it. That toe was as purple as a crayon for about a month.
Overall, my dad sounds pretty unlucky, or maybe prone to injuries. Even though he had all of these injuries, my dad always says that each time that you get hurt, it just makes you stronger.