“Don’t mess with sticks.” I have been taught that by my parents for many years while most other kids probably have too. But still, being a young boy, sticks held my fancy. My neighbors have ten kids since the start of deer season ranging from a baby to a son who finished with his college degree and has his own kid. They have five boys, so they have been making stick forts and stick swords for a number of years.
One day I was at their house because my parents wanted to go fishing. We went outside and, as we shouldn’t have, started throwing a stick spear around. The three of us were in a triangle and the objective was to throw the stick at someone and hit someone when you had it, or to dodge or catch it when it was thrown at you. In case you don’t know, that is a very bad idea. One time when it was thrown at me I couldn’t move fast enough out of the way, and it hit me in the left eye. Luckily my glasses took most of the force, but since it was a heavy stick, it broke them and kept going. The glass shattered everywhere and cut up my eyelid. If I wasn’t wearing my glasses the stick would have hit the bottom of my eye and have popped out my eye.
Even though I was lucky, I was hurt. The world seemed to have a red tint to it, and when I bent over and blinked, blood fell into my hand. It was a good thing that I didn’t feel it. I think that I was in shock. They were asking, “Are you okay?” and, “Where did it hit you?” They said this because I bent over and turned away from them when it hit me, and didn’t know where it hit me. They brought me inside and cleaned me up and tried to call my parents. They only got a hold of someone once, and she hand an accent from down south. We waited for my parents to get back, which was about four hours later. That was the longest four hours in my entire life. Since the two older kids there knew first aid they thought that I would need stitches but didn’t know any of my personal information and whether I was covered by insurance and other information like that.
When my parents finally came, they didn’t know what happened yet. Since my mom is a nurse, the first thing she did was start looking to see if I needed stitches. She thought I would need them so we went to the ER. It was midnight before we got there and I had to get eighteen stitches around my eye. Fifteen were in the upper eyelid and three were in the lower. My mom thought that I wouldn’t have needed so many stitches but after it was sewed up she said,” Wow, he really did need the stitches in the lower eye.” She thought they were just cut up a little and didn’t see how much the lid would have been better if I got stitches there until they were put in. When the doctor went to go get the novocain and needle, I tried to open my eye. That was another bad idea. It was hard to open and I finally opened it up to be blinded by the light the doctor used to look at the eye and would use to stitch it up. The doctor put novocain in the upper eyelid and stitched it up. When the thread went through the skin it felt really weird. The string was rubbing against tissues that have never been exposed to anything. The doctor then tried to sew up the bottom eyelid because hopefully the novocain would have reached the bottom eyelid and only three stitches were needed. It still hurt. I felt the poke of the needle and the thread this time felt like it was pulling fire behind it. I asked the doctor to put Novocain in the bottom eyelid because it hurt so much. The pain of the one needle was a lot better than having to feel that fire three times.
I got home at 1:00 am, and I was really tired. In the morning I was still tired and my eye was swollen shut. The person who threw the stick was very sorry and we haven’t had a stick fight since (although now we have airsoft gun and BB gun fights but that’s a different story.). In the morning, I just laid around and rested because I was VERY short on sleep. We have pictures, and my eye looked pretty bad. I still have scars.