Agua, por favor
The old man relentlessly
Cried out through the night.
Saturday, September 30, 2017
Today in the morning light I finally got a good look at what smashing my face into the ground had done to what once was, in my semi-humble opinion, a pretty decent looking face. It wasn’t pretty now, though it pretty much was what I expected.
Shockingly, I was fortunate in that my face has once again made it through without a broken bone. I do a have chipped tooth and a small bone chip in my neck, which isn’t bad relatively speaking.
And once again I have to give credit to a helmet for taking a large brunt of the impact and sparing me from what could’ve been prolonged and crippling damage. So again, for all you kids out there…
Last time I made a similar mistake of inattentiveness I escaped with just some cuts and swollen lips and nose. This time I added the experience of a couple dozen stitches just to see if I could conjure up what that was like after all these years. As a 4 year old, I ran into a chair and had to have a couple of stitches in my eyebrow. So little Michael, I can now relate to the pain you went through. Thursday, I added quite a bit more stitches to the facial repertoire along my nose and right under it. There’s also a few dissolving sutures inside my mouth so eating won’t be as problematic.
And the experienced reinforced my opinion of doctors as being one of the more honest and admirable professions. When the doctor said he it was going to hurt when he injected me with a disinfectant before he stitched me up, he was usually right on the money. In fact I’d say he was even being a bit modest in using the word ‘hurt’ at times. At one point a small tear of pain rolled out of the corner of my eye. It’s about as close to crying as I’ve come through physical trauma. Chalk another one up to for the Old Marine Drill Sear gent of a dad.
It was also quite an experience to literally get a right under my nose close up view of the stitching procedure. When I was a kid a lot of us kids would look down our noses to cross our eyes. I wish I would of thought of that instead of looking at the doctor’s bloody fingers as he prepared to put that little fish hook through me more times than I thought I was going to be able to tolerate.
The stitches look well done to me but we’ll just have to wait and see as the doc said it would take a couple of months to heal completely. I’m hoping for a grizzled “He really kicked the shit out of me, didn’t he?” William Muny/Clint Eastwood Unforgiven macho old guy look that would in no way match my reticent personality. But who knows? Maybe after being somewhat of a wimp all these years that’ll change if my soul wants to play the rest of my life in touch with it’s new outward physical representation. So watch out you Little Bill runners out there, I’m coming for you and not for what you did to my friend but just for the hell of it.
The last thing I’ll note about the stitching procedure was a kind of funny translation incident. Many of the doctors here speak some English and the trauma doctor, Dr. DeGrasso, who laced me up, English was very good. Except that one of the first questions he asked me was, “Were you out of your mind?” I paused just for a second but figured he must mean, “Was I ever unconscious?” Just for a split second I thought to answer with something sarcastic like, ‘Isn’t it obvious?’, but wisely thought the wiser of it as I doubt he’d get the joke and causing him to waist precious time would rightly be enough of an irritant to cause him to not be so careful stitching my face back together.
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