Lemmie tell you the times where I broke open my face. Contains: talking about injuries, mild mentions of blood and bone, scars, anecdotes Did something a little different when it came to this week’s SFW audio, I hope you all like it! ~Audio Transcript Below~ Now, a lot of people wanted me to do another comfort audio, and I thought that I would do something a little different this time. I’m going to tell you a handful of stories, since I believe that sometimes, as a form of comfort, we just need to be taken away and not think about certain things for a while. So, I want you to sit down or lay back, relax if you can, so I can help you take your mind off of the things that are bringing you down. So, you comfy? Good. Today, I’m going to tell you how I split my chin open three separate times in my life, and the story of how I nearly split my eye open. It’s not too morbid, I wasn’t injured too badly, so I hope you enjoy. You’re probably wondering, K, how in the world did you split your chin open in the same place three different times in your life? What can I say? I lead with my chin. These different injuries happened when I was around 3, 6, and 18 years old. My eye injury happened when I was about 5 or so. So let’s start with the beginning. I have always been a rather energetic and rather quick witted person. My mom always told me that I would find my way out of things that a normal baby or child shouldn’t have, and that I was so adventurous that it would get me into trouble sometimes. Namely, the chin thing. You’d think that someone like me would have a ton of broken bones, right? Nope, just four different scars on my head alone and some stories to tell. So like I said, I got my first scar when I was 3 years old. The story about how the scar happened isn’t the really interesting part of this story, but what happened once I got injured is. So, imagine me, little kid around 3, running around and climbing on everything there was to climb. In the house I lived in at the time, living room butted right up to the kitchen, sort of an open living kind of thing, so the back of the couch was pushed right on the cusp of the linoleum floor of the kitchen. I don’t remember this very well, but my Mom told me I was climbing over the top of the couch, and without warning, I flipped over it and landed right on my chin. Naturally I started screaming my head off, and my parents drove me immediately to the hospital with a cloth pressed tightly to my chin. We get to the hospital and they take me into a room where the doctor says they’re gonna have to use stitches to fix me up. Being 3 at the time, I didn’t know what that meant, only that I was in pain and in a strange place and I just wanted the pain to stop and to go home. So they lay me down on a table (or something I don’t quite remember) and the doctor starts like coming at me with the needle, and my mom and like the nurse are trying to soothe me but I ain’t havin’ any of it–because hello I’m three and there’s a strange person coming at me with a needle–and so I freak out and start thrashing, and it takes about two or three nurses to hold me down. One at my feet, another at my arms, and the last one holding my head still so the doctor can stitch me up. My mom and the nurse at my head are still trying to soothe me, and I don’t remember this really, but apparently, the nurse at my head was telling me, “It’s ok honey, we’re just trying to help you,” and according to my mom–remember how I said I was a quick witted child?–I looked that nurse as dead in the eye as I could, and without missing a beat, I said in the most deadpan voice. “Don’t help me.” My Mom said it was one of the hardest times she had to muffle her laughter, because she thought it was one of the funniest things I had ever said up until that point. Apparently though they eventually got me stitched up and everything was fine after that. I got a cool scar, and I moved on with my life. Now, the next scar, is the one next to my eye. It’s literally right on the cusp of my left eye socket, and there was a probability that if anything had gone worse than it did, then I may have really permanently damaged my eye. The scar luckily turned out relatively small, and you can only see it on certain days or when I smile. Now with this injury, both the way I got the injury, and how they fixed it is rather funny. So, for a great part of my life, my parents were Church Worship Leaders–if you don’t know what that means, basically, members of the church volunteer or try out and form a band to lead the members of the congregation through worship songs before (and sometimes after) the sermon–so I spent a LOT of time at church when I was a kid, since they had to be there to sing and play for every single service the church had. So I’m about 5 maybe, and I’m hanging out in one of the common areas near the Sunday School classrooms, just kinda dinking around like kids do while my parents are warming up before the service, and I start to spin around, trying to make myself dizzy–as small children do. Unfortunately for me, being 5, I misjudged my trajectory, and I spun myself, face first, directly into the wall. I hit myself so hard that I legitimately knocked myself out for a few minutes. I remember waking up to someone splashing water on my face, and it was an elderly gentleman who had seen what happened and was trying to clean me and wake me up. Let me tell you I was so hopped up on adrenaline I hardly felt any pain, and I was more like flabbergasted and focused on this nice man that I didn’t know who was helping me out instead of the injury. So they alert my parents, who come out of the sanctuary like, “What the fuck have you done now child,” and see that my face is once again busted open, but it’s my eye this time! And they decide, ok, we need to go to the hospital and get you fixed. Kicker is….is that it’s Christmas Eve….so that’s a pretty important service when it comes to Church, and my Mom sings and my Dad plays the piano and the guitar, so they’re kind of important. And like, the leader of the band was saying, “We need you we need you, there are two services tonight and we don’t have any backup.” Meanwhile my parents are gesturing to me, their child who is just perfectly chilling out, high on adrenaline with a busted open face like, “Yeah no, our child is bleeding profusely, we need to go.” So off to the hospital we went! Funny side note, before all this happened I was super bummed that one of my friends hadn’t shown up–I only ever saw him at church and only sometimes–but as we’re walking out and I’m still bleeding, we passed him coming into the Church, and I tried to talk to him and say hi because I was so happy to see him even though my parents are trying to drag my bleeding ass into the fucking car. The funny thing is is that I only realized later in life that I had A HUGE crush on this boy, huge enough that actual injury wasn’t gonna stop me from talking to him. So eventually we get to the hospital which is thankfully open, and like, as they’re trying to figure out what to do, my Dad kind of leans into the doctor and is like, “Is there any way we can like….avoid stitches? Cause like we don’t really want a huge scar on the kid’s face and uh….last time with stitched didn’t go so well and uh….don’t think a 5 year old is gonna like having a needle comin’ at his eye” The doctor was like, “Oh yeah sure we can just glue it shut and use a butterfly bandage.” Which worked LEAGUES better than stitches let me tell you. They bandaged me up and sent us on our way. I don’t actually remember whether or not we went back to church. I blame it on the head injury. The second time I got a scar on my chin is probably the most uneventful of the four scars. I was about 6, and we were at a park with family friends, but this park was different because some of the playground equipment was made of stone, because it was themed to be castle–like (it was called castle park). This was in the late nineties when playground equipment wasn’t mostly plastic. Long story short, I tripped and fell and landed right on my chin again. I was hysterical of course, because this time, I split it REALLY bad because I landed right on a hard rock. My mom told me that she was looking at my chin and said that there was something white in the wound that she couldn’t figure it out, and one of the other Mom’s that was there kind of leaned over and quietly said, “Yeah, that’s bone” and so back to the hospital I went. They did have to stitch me up again that time, but it went better than the last time I had to get stitches. I went 12 long years without a head injury. But apparently, my chin injury curse is divisible by 3, since I was 18 when I got the–hopefully–final scar on my chin. So, the summer before I started college, my parents and I went on a trip about a state over for this HUGE famous swap meet thing they were having in their town. (a swap meet is like a flea market where people sell mostly second hand things. Think of like a collective of garage sales, but this one was focused in the downtown area of the city) It was incredibly windy that day, so much so that it was almost blowing our truck around. So we get to the city, and somehow my Mom, my Dad and I all get kind of separated, since my Dad was going down one side of the street, I was going down the other side to get to the swap meet, and my mom was still kind of checking things in the car. Speaking of the wind. I was wearing a baseball cap, and while I was walking, the wind blew it right off my head and into the street. Now I really liked this hat, and so I went into the street to get it. Before you get worried, I DID look both ways and made sure it was clear of cars so I wasn’t about to get run over. So I ran into the street, quickly grabbed it, and pivoted quickly on my feet and ran out of the street so that I wasn’t in danger of getting hit by any cars. However, I pivoted and ran too quickly, and started to lose my balance due to forward momentum. And I would have been fine and equalized myself….if the curb hadn’t have been there. So my foot catches on the curb, and I have enough time to think, “If I don’t pick my head up, I’m going to break my fucking nose”, and I didn’t want to do that, so I picked my head up, but landed on the left corner of my chin. I almost immediately grab my chin as soon as it happens, half sprawled in the street, trying to figure out if I’m ok, and I check and I see that my hand has blood on it. Now I can’t really see how I’m injured, but I had a bad feeling. Then I looked up as I heard shouting. See I tripped in front of this store, and apparently, the owner had seen what happened, and came out yelling, asking if I was ok. I tried to calmly explain to her as I’m holding my chin that I’m fine, that I just tripped and I’m bleeding. She–still hysterical–asks me if I need a bandaid or to come inside or if I need to call my parents. I calmly explain that my parents were close enough and that they should have seen what happened and should be here in a minute and that my mom should have something to clean me up with. APPARENTLY I WAS WRONG, and neither of my parents had seen what happened. My Dad thought I had been hit by a car since I was laying in the street, and told me he about had a heart attack as he ran over to me, and my Mom had thought about the same thing, but could see me from a better vantage point. Now the store owner lady was still pretty hysterical, and I’m just trying to figure out if I’m ok because I’m kind of dizzy and I jammed my head pretty damn hard. My Mom gets to me first and she says something along the lines of, “What happened?” I look up at her and calmly and carefully say, “I think I split my chin open again.” A moment of silence passes between us, and my Mother says, “Are you kidding me?!” I gave her a look. No, “Oh my God, are you ok?” or anything like that. So I say to her, “Why would I kid about that?” She realizes I’m serious and checks me over, and yup, I split it open again, but this time, it’s not NEARLY as bad since I just nicked the corner. It was kinda deep, and bled a lot–as head injuries do–but it didn’t need stitches. So after everyone is done freaking out, my mom does in fact pull out disinfectant, gauze, and a big bandaid from her Marry Poppin’s bag of a purse and slaps it on me right there in the street. I was ok, but sometimes when I get injured, I get really nauseated, so I couldn’t go walk around for very long. I ended up sitting in the truck while my parents shopped only after assuring them about a hundred million times that I was ok. In the end, everything was fine and we got home safe. Thing is, this happened the weekend before I started college. And my very first class in college, just so happened to be karate. So I go in at seven in the morning to meet my new classmates and teacher with a big bandage on my face, knowing, just KNOWING, that someone is going to comment. Turns out, my teacher is the one who says something.The first thing my 60 year old 6’6” 5th degree black belt teacher ever said to me was, “Beat someone up already killer?” I just smiled at him and said, “You have no idea.”