Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Murphey's Law applies to my life: If it can go wrong, it will.

I'm sure it has become very obvious that I am always involved in freak accidents. Things that should only be minor accidents, such as tripping on a towel and tripping over sidewalk barriers, are always perfectly timed and lined up so that they have the worst possible outcomes. Namely, me bleeding and in need of stitches at the emergency room.

My second run in with stitches, before the car door and after the bathroom door, did not involve a door. At least, the door did not directly do any damage to me, although there was definitely a door involved in this bloody accident.

And I use the term "accident" loosely. Because all of the events leading up to the need of stitches resulted from my older sister's intention to do me harm. To be fair, she meant to scare the living shit out of me so that I would give her what she wanted, so mental harm, as opposed to the physical harm that ends this story.

First, you need to hear the beginning, which all starts with a toilet. We lived in Jacksonville, Florida by this point in me life. I was about six years old, Sherrell was seven, and the Twinkies (our fond name for the twins) were about three years old. One day, Sherrell and I decided we wanted to know what made the toilet work, and to discover this we combined our strength to lift the porcelain cover off of the back of the toilet. However, once in our grasp, we discovered it was too heavy to support, and in our childish ability to immediately solve problems, we simply let it go.

It broke neatly into two pieces on the bathroom floor, and we got into a lot of trouble that day. Not only for breaking the lid in the first place, but also for flooding the bathroom afterward. My parents were busy people, and didn't bother to move the broken top from the floor. They assumed that we were smart enough to not play with it, and we were. Probably because it was too heavy for us to lift and not out of any desire to actually leave the damn thing alone. In any case, it sat there for a few months, never bothered and never noticed, in the bathroom that belonged to Sherrell and I.

I'm not sure if it was two or three months later that the accident occurred. Our friends, Kenny and Annette, had come over to play. We all immediately decided we were going to play Batman. Kenny, as the only boy, was Batman by default. I immediately called, "I'm Catwoman!" The rule was whoever called it first got it.

Sherrell: NU-UH! I WANTED TO BE CATWOMAN!

Me: I called it first! Too late!

Sherrell: I'm the oldest!

Me: You know the rules! I called it first!

Sherrell was several inches taller than me, despite being only a year older. She easily overpowered me, dragging me into the hallway and shoving me as hard as she could into the bathroom. I ran forward again, trying to get out. She switched of the light, then pushed me backwards again as hard as she could, then slammed the bathroom door shut. The momentum of her shove sent me reeling back towards the bathtub, and my foot fount the broken edge of the topper.

It cut into my foot and I felt the worst pain I had ever felt in my life. To this day, there is no amount of injury that has caused the bright red pain and agony that cut to my foot produced. I didn't even know what had happened to me, only that my foot was desperately hurting and now there was something wet on the floor.

I started screaming bloody murder, ran in the direction of the door. I tried pulled it open, but I couldn't. Sherrell was laughing at the other end, holding the door shut. I screamed and screamed and screamed. She didn't let go.

Finally, my parents heard my shrieks and came to investigate. They opened the bathroom door, switched on the light, and my mother immediately started freaking out. I had trailed puddles of blood all over the bathroom floor, and I was sitting there, crying, holding my bleeding foot and screaming like the Devil himself was standing next to me.

Mom put tourniquet on my foot, then wrapped a towel around the cut to stop the bleeding while Dad went next door to get a neighbor to watch Sherrell, Kenny, Annette, and the Twinkies. They rushed me to the ER where I got sixteen stitches in my foot, and the doctor was a man with blue eyes and brown hair who told silly jokes like, "Why did the cow cross the road? To get to the MOOvies!" while he was sewing up my foot.

Sherrell got into lots of trouble when we got home. It was one of the few times in my memory that mother actually punished her for something she did to me. They took the broken lid out of the bathroom after that and bought a plastic one to replace it. Evidently they thought we might break another porcelain one, and they wanted to prevent another accident.

I slept in Mommy and Daddy's room that night because I didn't want to share the room with Sherrell. I was still mad at her for trying to kill me. (I'd somehow managed to convince myself that she had intended I die in the bathroom, although I'm not certain how that particular thought entered my head. Maybe because my dad had screamed "You could have killed her!")

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