A lot of us are going with injury stories, so I'll just continue with that. This one's kinda gorey. When I was thirteen, I was sitting in the den playing something like Choplifter or Defender on our old Apple II/e
. I finished playing and got up to leave the room. We had these French doors. If you don't know what those are, here's a pic:
The door was shut, and also the knob had been absent for awhile. Normally, one would just push on the outer frame to open it. Well, in my clumsiness and lack of paying attention I missed the frame and pushed my right hand directly through one of the glass panes (this is the dumb part). Reflexively, I jerked it back through. I looked down and had a gash through my wrist that was already pouring blood. Naturally, I freaked out.
We wrapped a towel around it and all jumped in the car and drove to the hospital. My pops kept telling me to calm down so my heart wouldn't beat as fast so the blood wouldn't pour out as quickly. So we get to the hospital and run to the triage counter. They took a look and saw that, fortunately, the glass had missed the major vein there, as it was a horizontal cut. Also, upon further inspection, it just barely missed the tendons, which is really good. It got right down to them, they were fully exposed, but didn't even nick them. Had one been severed, I'd have been in a world of trouble.
Anyway, the doc said he could tell by the direction of the cut that it was actually the jerking back through the broken pane that cut me. I got like 31 stitches, both internal and external, and had to wear a brace for a month or so to prevent myself from bending my wrist and pulling any of the stitches.
I still have a prominent, thick scar about two inches in length, running sort of diagonally across the upper part of my wrist, with about a centimeter stretching to my palm. The scars from the stitches are even still very visible. There's a smaller stitched scar beneath it as well. I never think about it, of course, but I'm sure there are strangers that sometimes wonder whether I tried to off myself. I know people have asked me about it after I've recently made their acquaintance/friendship. I say no, and then get to tell them this story, heh.
Our weeks are 40 hours long, thus proves that Dutch are more efficient than Germans
(j/k alright?)
