My First Trip To The Emergency Room

'Fiddling' was one of my favorite hobbies when I was in elementary school. I would take sticks from all different trees around the neighborhood and carve designs into the bark, or strip it off completely. Of course now I understand that this is called whittling not fiddling, but as a young boy I refused to be troubled by such conventions as the words I used in everyday conversation actually existing. My friends and I would design complex games of war and then beat each other with those sticks, using them as swords, until someone started crying or all of the weapons broke. Since I was too young for my mother to grant me the permanent responsibility of owning my own pocket knife I would surreptitiously steal kitchen knives, and use those to carve most of my swords.

One day, during a typical muggy, post-rain Portland Spring afternoon I was using a serrated steak knife to carve whorls into one of the best sticks ever. a long, slender, and yet dense Oak branch that I had torn off of some unsuspecting neighbor's tree. I distinctly remember coming across a difficult and ugly little knot in the otherwise beautiful, soon to be sword. So, I of course began to hack and saw at the evil little knot with all of my ten year old self's strength and ferocity.

Suddenly, the knot popped right off of the branch without an ounce of resistance and the sap-stained stainless steel serrated edge of one of my mother's more expensive steak knives sliced deep into my left index finger. I let go of the knife with my right hand and watched the handle slowly rotate downward like a Victorian monarch's thumb declaring execution. Once the handle reached the apex of its rotation the blade slid out of my finger and fell to the increasingly bloody ground next to my red-stained bare feet. Then the pain came. And came. And continued to explode across my consciousness despite my screaming.

My family rushed to my aid. My mother fainted right away, I learned later that she thought that I had cut off my whole hand. My father took his shirt off and wrapped my hand in it as he picked me up and began to move towards the car. The ride to the hospital was only a blur of white hot pain and road rage at the mundane idleness with which the rest of traffic was driving.

Upon reaching the hospital I was forced to wait no less than thirty, or perhaps even forty minutes until finally thank god a nurse ushered us into a curtained off "room" and sowed my bisected finger back together. After the nine stitches sealed my wound closed I passed out. I slept for quite awhile. I later discovered that with me asleep, and already being downtown my dad took about an hour or so to run some errands before coming home to my mother who was, understandably in my opinion, angry at his dalliance. In all, I learned from then on to stick with paring knives rather than their serrated cousins when doing my fiddling work.


The story is as much about me cutting my hand as it is about how little control a child has over their own care. I was an object in the story that an action was happening to throughout most of the blog. Is there an overarching moral? Perhaps not, but the vivid red of my blood pouring out of my hand that day is still fresh in my memory, hopefully after reading this you'll be able to recall it too.