Scar (short) (669 hits)
Category: NoneRating: 1.67 on 4 reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by matnotharry <mattreallysmells.at.hotmail.com> (View user info) at 2005-11-22 18:07:51 EST
I was given a bike for my birthday when I was eleven. It was big, black and had 18 gears. It was the business.
I rode it round the garden all summer, but as winter drew on the bike was dumped in the garage behind a load of chairs and my access was denied. When summer came again, I wasn't interested.
Then the boys got bikes for Christmas and took to racing round the block in a hell-for-leather fashion. Ignoring potential fatality I joined them by nicking the younger brother's bike whenever I could: it had suspension, big handle bars and a grip gear change. It was the shit. Unfortunately the boy shared the same view and my rides were few and far between. Though when I did, I always started last and finished first.
My downfall came when I started late and I was straining to catch up. On the final straight I thought I had it in the bag.
Then I fell.
One second zooming along and then I'm on the road in a head, head spinning just as fast as the bike spokes. I took a quick injury inventory, checking where I was hurting - expecting, almost hoping to find a foot bent sideways or a thigh bone sticking out or something with a load of blood, as males tend to do.
But I was disappointed; I had a few cuts and a large hole in the arm with some white stuff in a mass of dark red. In retrospect I was lucky not to hit my head, as I didn't have a crash hat.
I looked dizzily around and groaned. Some old man helpfully observed that we were all 'going too fast'. Instead of releasing a tirade of four letter profanities as I might today, I mumbled some Aesop shit about helping someone first then scolding them, but gave up and started hobbling home.
I met the little ones on the way back and received several commiserating and admiring exclamations, but no aid. Bastards.
The Madre was more helpful and gave me water to stick the elbow in and scooted off in that efficient way to find an emergency baby-sitter, as English mums tend to do in a 'crisis'.
My little face looked green in the hospital mirror as the nurse gave her expertise on my war-wound ("nasty, very nasty") and I was given the fourth priority green sticker, as a rating of importance.
- For the record: red was a life or death emergency like a car crash, yellow was urgent with lots of blood, orange was urgent but without the blood, green was stuff for the nurses, blue was a way of asking whether you should be here ie, paper cuts.
We sat in the waiting room with a bunch of other sniffling unfortunates in varying degrees of agony with only tatty Prima magazines from the 80s for suicide prevention, as well as the standard graphic posters featuring athlete's foot, tapeworms and the like.
After a small eternity my name was called. I was sat in a small windowless room (it was the NHS after-all) with a bed, a trolley of curious chrome-plated implements and another poster displaying nasty eye diseases.
I lay down and looked away as suggested whilst a nurse filled a syringe the size of bicycle pump with painkiller. I looked anyway of course, just in time to see the nurse lunge at my arm like she was trying to get that needle through a tree trunk instead of my road-tenderised flesh.
After a minute she finished her merciless wriggling of the needle and went on to sew up my arm using thread and a comically large pair of scissors. One quick bandage later and I was 'right as rain'.
Despite repeated insistences that it would be gone in a month if I left it alone, as soon as the stitches were out the majority of my waking hours was spent picking at the bugger and leaving the flakes in inappropriate places. What's left now two years down the line is a soft, hairless, nasty looking scar.
Perfect.
User Reviews
Submitted by matnotharry (user info) at 2005-11-23 18:53:50 EST (#)
Ranking: 0
Submitted by joedaddy (user info) at 2005-11-22 23:25:05 (#)
Ranking: 2
seeing a broken white thing
is the only thing worse than seeing a white thing
unless you see nothing
----------------------------
How proverbial
Submitted by joedaddy (user info) at 2005-11-22 23:25:05 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
seeing a broken white thing
is the only thing worse than seeing a white thing
unless you see nothing
Submitted by DropItLikeItsDisgusting (user info) at 2005-11-22 19:25:50 EST (#)
Ranking: 1
Bikes suck, but good job.
Submitted by ama (user info) at 2005-11-22 18:09:07 EST (#)
Ranking: 2
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