Mind the gap. Watch your step. Warning: steep climb. What do all of these have in common? If you don’t pay attention, you could suffer. To all people that tend to be clumsy or lost in your thoughts, please just watch your step. I am a person who enjoys focusing on my thoughts. This ended up coming back to smack me in the face, literally!

It all started with a camping trip. A very normal camping trip in the wild woods. My father, sister and I went to Olympic National Park. We decided to make camp at the beach flowing with seawater, sand and driftwood. There was a campsite nearby, just walking distance away from the beach. It was summertime. The sun radiated an orange hue as it fell upon the dark trees.

It was late. We were leaving in the morning, but decided to take a walk on the beach before going to sleep. In order to reach the beach, we had to climb, duck, and hop across the various driftwood in all manner of sizes. Some were twigs, where others were trees. There was no avoiding them to cross the beach.

I hopped across large driftwood logs, balancing myself as I walked along them, skipping across parallel smaller branches. There were small spaces between the logs where I could walk along the soft grains of sand that covered my toes. Then I would have to ascend again.

The sun set upon the ocean, glistening on the water with what little light it had left. These logs were big, they weren’t wet, thankfully, so it would be hard to lose your footing. The sky grew darker as I hopped towards the next log…”HEY!” my sister shouts, “Don’t fall!” she warned.

SLAM! I didn’t hear the sound of my head hit the driftwood. I couldn’t hear noise. I couldn’t stay in focus. I was in shock. It was hard to remember anything after that, other than scarlet blotches covering the log, and the blood running through my fingers.

I gently touched my tooth, and it felt like it was sideways in my gums.My gums bled where my tooth used to be. My father and sister walked me back to the campsite, where I was able to use napkins to stop the bleeding and waited for them to put the camp away.

The nearest hospital was hours away, which was how long I had to wait in the car with a distasteful napkin in my mouth. It felt like there was no drive. From what I remember, I got into the car, and I left the car; then the doors of the hospital were opened to reveal the emergency room. We checked in with the clerk. it was late. Very few people were present in the room, so the wait wasn’t very long. The room was bright. A TV with the news was report the wildfire that currently lingered within the nearby forests. The clerk called my name. We all moved into a room that was up a few floors. It was a long room with enough space to hold a hospital bed, a doctor’s desk and two chairs on the other side. It had a cleaning table at the end of the room and a television in the left corner of the bed mounted on the ceiling. Then we waited.

What does a doctor do while you wait for him? I had to deal with the longest wait of them all. Though I can’t complain, I finally recovered from shock, and once I did, I quickly grabbed the TV remote and turned on the power. I had to switch through dozens of channels before I could find something entertaining. I stopped at a comedy with four men pranking each other and giving each other challenges. It was the first time I felt relaxed since the beach.

It felt nice to be relaxed again. I was still irritated by my tooth, because it wasn’t in the right place. I wasn’t sleepy. I was nervous, but somehow I was still able to feel relaxed. Although my anxiety was still pretty elevated. What could happen to my tooth? What if he has to pull it out? What if I need a fake tooth? What if… what if… My father and sister sat in the two chairs next to my hospital bed laughing at a prank the four men made on the TV. I then noticed a blanket placed at the foot of the hospital bed. I grabbed it sluggishly and cozied myself beneath it. I was relaxed again. I can’t really tell which of the two I felt the most, it was mostly my anxiety telling me “You’re gonna die!”, but my tranquility stating “You are fine.” It was like they bickered the whole time I waited, and they would only stop until the doctor came.

Fortunately, he did. The doctor walked through the door. He was a man who donned a long, white coat and pair of glasses that I can’t recall now. He walked in and asked about the incident, as I explained to him with a little help from my father and sister. Once he understood the situation, he opened my mouth to examine the damage. He used a doctor’s light and purple surgical gloves to look around behind my lips and gums. The gloves felt like rubber and tasted horrible. He entered his notes onto his computer and came to the conclusion that I would need stitches in the back of my upper lip. There was a cut there. Which is probably where a majority of the blood came from. He left to grab his materials and was not long before he came back with a needle and thread. He used the needle to administer a numbing medication to my lip that relieved most of the pain.

Then the doctor told a tale of a man that he gave the most stitches to. This man was a biker. He loved riding his motorcycle. He got into an accident while riding. As a result, he suffered a large wound that spanned across his right shoulder to his left lower back. The doctor met with this man many years ago and after seeing him, came to the conclusion that he needed stitches. He numbed him and began to sew him together. By the end, he sewed fifty stitches into the man! I wondered how long that took.

He told me that he would have to give two stitches. I groaned, because that meant my sister would have more stitches then I would. When I explained this to the doctor, he examined me again and concluded with a grin, that I would need three stitches instead. The doctor said I would need to see a dentist, as well. With the numbing shot still taking effect, he began the stitching. I hardly felt it, thanks to the numbing drug. I’m glad I didn’t feel it! Can you imagine somebody slowly and carefully stabbing a needle into the back of your lip? With every puncture, a thread filling its place. There for several days.

When the doctor was finished, we left. It was late in the night and the drive home began. We lived in Vancouver, so the drive took three hours. It was a relaxing and interesting drive. My tooth was still pointing the wrong direction. My tooth still felt weird. Ever since I was very young, I always feel sleepy and relax whenever I am a passenger in a moving car at night. And so, my eyes started to feel heavy and I couldn’t keep them up any longer.

I woke up to my father shaking me, and that I’m home. The clock in the car read 3:06am with the colon blinking. My sister and I went inside the house to find my mother, just my mother, waiting for me in the living room, struggling to stay awake. My stepfather and other sister fell asleep hours later, but when my mom heard about what happened to me, she tried everything she could to stay awake until I got home. When I saw my mom, she was watching a stand-up comedy show on Netflix with an empty cup of coffee that left a coffee ring on the wooden end table next to my mom.

She almost leapt off of the couch and gave me a huge hug, and inspected the stitches that were administered to my lip. I looked up at her with tired eyes. It didn’t take long to notice how tired I was. She sent me straight to bed.

I woke up groggy and sluggish several days later, to find my stitches had disappeared. We never found the stitches after that, but some theorize that I ate them in my sleep. My tooth had been misplaced for days, but this was the day I would see the dentist.

After breakfast, my mother took me straight to the dentist. They sat me down in a x-ray chair, where they had me bite on a distasteful piece of plastic. I had to do this several times in order to get an x-ray picture. It was a nice jaw workout. I was sat down in the dentist patient chair to wait for the dentist to finished observing at the x-ray photographs. He came back, and he said he was prepared pull it back into place. First, he gave me a shot for my gums filled with a numbing drug similar to that of the drug the doctor used to stitch my lip. So he strapped a rubber glove to his hand and used it to pull my tooth right back into place. After the dentist pulled my tooth, it was, well almost back to normal. To this day I can still feel my tooth slightly different than the other teeth, but after eating with my tooth and adjusting to it’s placement, I got used to it. The next thing I remember after my tooth was pulled, was being in the same shock I was in when I smacked my tooth on that log.

With that in mind, please watch your step. It could have ended a lot worse for me. I might have lost my tooth and need to get a fake replacement, with that wrong feeling of misplacement in my mouth for the rest of my life. Please understand the importance of watching your step. Think before you walk ahead, and next time you hear or read: “Mind the gap,” remember my story and try to learn from my experience.